The headline on the Telegraph regarding this work, "Genes behind serious illnesses discovered." More from the story, "The study has identified, for the first time, some of the genes that trigger these diseases."

The alelles that trigger heart disease, arthritis, high blood pressure, diabetes, bipolar disorder and chron's disease, all discovered. 8-)

Baaah!!!!! I love it.
I think the reporter who wrote that story watched Gattica one too many times.

it's gattAca for a reason. 8-)

Lol to the last comment :)

DOH! I stand corrected, it's Gattaca. There goes my date with Uma Thurman.

I understand 'whiteness' in Europeans and Chinese are dependant on diiffrent markers,so it is possible this study may not apply to the rest of the world?

As a psychiatric genetics researcher, their BP results are in the same class as their hypertension results and not so much with the CAD, CD, TIID etc. results. They used the Affy platform, which chose SNPs randomly and so genuine findings show up as clusters of hits--you can see this in their figure 5. Their BP hit is in the figure, but doesn't look like the others, which show the clustering pattern quite nicely.

To plug my own paper that came out last month about BD, replication will be vital here. Wellcome did not report it, but one of their results overlaps with one of ours, and it's not the chr16 locus they report.

I understand 'whiteness' in Europeans and Chinese are dependant on diiffrent markers,so it is possible this study may not apply to the rest of the world?

it's always a possibility that these findings might not apply to anyone except the study population.

Their BP hit is in the figure, but doesn't look like the others, which show the clustering pattern quite nicely.

good point, I hadn't noticed that.

re: replication. given the winner's curse, replication samples have to be much larger than the original (more for other readers; I'm sure you're well aware of that). Which means we're taking upwards of 5000 cases. could be a difficult sample to collect...

decode or kaiser could get samples of that size

There are a few more BP samples in existence and being collected, although I'd be surprised if they'd even add up to 5000....but this is a whole other rant :)

The derived pellagra allele must be very new -- that normally results from relying solely on corn, which only was possible after the Euros started bringing it back from the Americas.