PLoS ONEToday PLoS ONE published a new paper by Connie Mulligan, Amy Non, and me about the relations between genetic ancestry, social classification, and blood pressure in southeastern Puerto Rico. The UF news office is better than I am at explaining the results of research to a general audience, so here’s an excerpt of what they say in their press release:

When it comes to health disparities between different groups, how society sees people in terms of race might play a greater role than genetics, according to a new University of Florida study.

The study also showed that taking stock of socio-cultural factors might improve our understanding of how genes influence individual health — regardless of race.

Consider high blood pressure, a complex disease governed both by genetic and environmental factors. Not only was social classification better than genetic-based ancestry at predicting disease status, it also brought to light a link between a particular gene and blood pressure that was not apparent when only genetic ancestry was considered.

The study, published today in the journal PLoS ONE, is the first to rigorously combine both socio-cultural and genetic data to simultaneously test the relative contributions of each to racial inequalities in health.

“What’s really groundbreaking is that we’ve got both types of data and they’re of equivalent sophistication,” said co-author Connie Mulligan, an associate professor of anthropology and an associate director of the UF Genetics Institute.

The results suggest that previously reported associations between genetic ancestry and health might be accounted for by socio-cultural factors related to race and racism, and not necessarily to genetic differences between races. It also suggests that including socio-cultural factors can strengthen genetics studies and help reveal how social inequalities can lead to biological differences.

“We have to take seriously the way race shapes people’s experiences, the environments they live in and their life chances,” said lead author Clarence C. Gravlee, an assistant professor of anthropology at UF. “In day to day life, people often assume that race exists as biology. Most anthropologists and geneticists reject that idea and see race instead as a cultural construct. The point of our paper is that race is so embedded in our society that it affects biology by shaping the types of environments that people live in.”

See the full press release here or check out one reader’s take over at the Gene Expression blog.

One great feature of PLoS journals is that readers can make notes and post comments about the paper directly on the PLoS ONE website itself. If you have comments, questions, or criticism, it would be great to see them posted on the PLoS ONE website to kick off a conversation about the paper.