Finding And Synthesizing The Best Evidence On Gene-disease Associations

Main Category: Genetics
Article Date: 03 Mar 2009 - 5:00 PDT

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"The past decade has witnessed growing interest in genetic predisposition to common diseases, and along with rapid advancements in high-throughput genotyping technology, has resulted in a tremendous amount of published epidemiological evidence on gene-disease associations," says a team of researchers in this week's PLoS Medicine. Julian Higgins (MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom) and colleagues say that with this growth in evidence comes an increasing need to collate and summarize the evidence in order to identify true genetic associations among the large volume of false positives. The preferred approach to summarizing this evidence is to conduct a systematic review-in which researchers try and answer a research question by identifying, selecting, appraising, and synthesizing all high quality research evidence relevant to that question. Higgins and colleagues lay out some key components of the methodology for undertaking such systematic reviews of genetic association studies.

Citation:
"Systematic reviews of genetic association studies."
Sagoo GS, Little J, Higgins JPT (2009)
PLoS Med 6(3): e1000028. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000028
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PLoS Medicine is an open access, freely available international medical journal. It publishes original research that enhances our understanding of human health and disease, together with commentary and analysis of important global health issues. For more information, visit http://www.plosmedicine.org

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