Genetic Ancestry, Race, and Health Disparities: A Biocultural Approach

遗传血统、种族和健康差异：生物文化方法

• 批准号: 0820687
• 负责人: Connie Mulligan
• 金额: $ 39.16万
• 依托单位: University of Florida
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-07-15 至 2015-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0820687&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Genetic; Ancestry; Race; Health; Disparities

Race and human disease are two issues in which genetics and culture play critical and inextricably linked roles. Moreover, research on racial disparities in complex disease is a central focus of the current debate on human genetic variation. This project will investigate the genetic underpinnings of race and disease within a biocultural context. The question driving the research is why African Americans suffer an increased prevalence of hypertension. This is a key test case since people of the African Diaspora suffer disproportionately from a number of complex diseases, which some researchers attribute to a fundamental genetic commonality. However, this view is problematic because of difficulties in defining racial groups and because it minimizes environmental influences on complex disease. This project adds a genetic component to ongoing research to test social and cultural factors involved in hypertension and stress-related phenotypes in African-Americans. DNA samples will be collected from 350 African American individuals and those samples will be assayed for ancestry informative genetic markers (for an estimate of genetic ancestry) and for candidate genes involved in hypertension and related phenotypes. Three sets of questions will be addressed: 1) What are the associations between different measures of race? 2) What association exists between genetic ancestry and hypertension? 3) Are associations between candidate gene polymorphisms and hypertension modified when ancestry, measures of skin color, and novel sociocultural data, such as personal social networks, are added to the model?The proposed research is a unique biocultural investigation of race and human disease in which the genetic and cultural components are addressed with equal rigor. Racial inequalities in health are among the most hotly debated issues in science. Often the debate is framed in terms of an opposition between genetic and sociocultural factors, when it is more realistic to posit that that there are complex interactions between genetic and sociocultural factors. However, few studies are able to test the independent contributions of genetic and sociocultural factors because ?race? is often used uncritically as a proxy for unspecified genetic, physiologic, behavioral, or sociocultural factors. Thus, this research has the potential to dramatically transform the ways in which we think of race, self-identity and health, and the ways in which we study these phenomena.

种族和人类疾病是遗传学和文化发挥关键和不可分割的作用的两个问题。此外，对复杂疾病中种族差异的研究是目前关于人类遗传变异的辩论的中心焦点。该项目将在生物文化背景下调查种族和疾病的遗传基础。推动这项研究的问题是为什么非裔美国人患高血压的患病率增加。这是一个关键的测试案例，因为非洲散居者不成比例地患有一些复杂的疾病，一些研究人员将其归因于基本的遗传共性。然而，这种观点是有问题的，因为在定义种族群体的困难，因为它最大限度地减少了环境对复杂疾病的影响。该项目为正在进行的研究增加了遗传成分，以测试与非洲裔美国人高血压和压力相关表型有关的社会和文化因素。将从350名非裔美国人中采集DNA样本，并对这些样本进行祖先信息遗传标记（用于估计遗传祖先）和高血压及相关表型相关的候选基因分析。将解决三组问题：1）不同种族措施之间的关联是什么？2)遗传祖先和高血压之间存在什么联系？3)当将祖先、肤色测量和新的社会文化数据（如个人社交网络）加入模型时，候选基因多态性与高血压之间的关联是否会改变？拟议中的研究是对种族和人类疾病的独特生物文化调查，其中遗传和文化成分得到同等严格的处理。健康方面的种族不平等是科学界争论最激烈的问题之一。这场辩论往往是以遗传因素和社会文化因素之间的对立为框架的，而更现实的是，遗传因素和社会文化因素之间存在着复杂的相互作用。然而，很少有研究能够测试遗传和社会文化因素的独立贡献，因为？种族？常被不加批判地用作未指明的遗传、生理、行为或社会文化因素的代表。因此，这项研究有可能极大地改变我们看待种族、自我认同和健康的方式，以及我们研究这些现象的方式。