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Race

Definition
AI-generated

Race is a socially defined category, historically tied to racism and power structures, that groups people by perceived physical traits or lineage.

Topics
Ethics, law & society
Related
Ancestry Ethnicity Participation Bias

Why it matters in GWAS

Cohort descriptors, harmonization across studies, and reporting standards (for example NIH and journal policies) frequently use race labels. Treating race as a biological proxy for genetics misstates causation, can obscure environmental and structural drivers of health disparities, and complicates interpretation of ancestry-aware GWAS and polygenic scores.

Example usage

"We reported both genetically inferred ancestry and self-reported race separately and avoided using race as a covariate for genetic confounding."

Ancestry Ethnicity Participation Bias Polygenic Risk Score Portability Population Stratification Trans-Ancestry GWAS
Related-term network

Click any node to open that term page.

Node order. The current term is first. Next come every page linked from Related terms, in the same top-to-bottom order as that list. Then new terms appear in two-hop layers: for each of those direct neighbors (in that same order), their related terms are appended if not already listed. A third pass does the same for two-hop nodes. The walk stops when a fixed maximum number of nodes is reached.

References

  • Borrell LN, et al. (2021). Race and genetic ancestry in medicine—a time for reckoning with racism. N Engl J Med.
  • Lewis ACF, et al. (2022). Getting genetic ancestry right for science and society. Science.
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