ABOVE: The Lieber Institute’s Rahul Bharadwaj examines brain tissue.
LIEBER INSTITUTE FOR BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
Search among the millions of volunteers in the world’s brain-based genomic studies, and you will be hard-pressed to find people of African ancestry. The largest meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of Parkinson’s disease to date, for example, didn’t include any individuals of primarily African descent among its more than 1.4 million participants, nor did a 2019 meta-analysis of GWASs examining depression. Only 4 percent of all neurological disorder research contained in the GWAS database of the National Human Genome Research Institute includes minority participants.
Databases such as these are critical to research on brain disorders and to genetics-based precision medicine. Yet the lack of data from non-Europeans means that researchers know very little about the genetic variants associated with disease risk in people of African descent, or about genetic biomarkers for disease severity, drug response, or ...
