| Comment | Yeah, so in some instances you get like low frequency and very rare but high 'penetrance' conditions like Huntingtons where if you have a certain mutation, the risk of disease is very high. There, it's mostly up to fate.
What we looked at here is a more common (in about 25% of the population), but medium-penetrance mutation (called a single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP, which makes scottish scientific vs. political twitter awkward), and asked if its association with particular outcomes was nullified if you didn't smoke, drink, exercised a lot etc. They helped, but the association was definitely still there. Basically nothing in epidemiology is 1:1, even smoking and lung cancer (probably the biggest).
That's just for the condition we looked at, of course. |
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