23andMe Pulls Off Massive Crowdsourced Depression Study
I believe this is the underlying paper: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;ng&#x2F;journal&#x2F;vaop&#x2F;ncurrent&#x2F;full&#x2F;ng.3623.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;ng&#x2F;journal&#x2F;vaop&#x2F;ncurrent&#x2F;full&#x2F;ng.3623....</a><p>GWA studies general should be treated with great caution.  The way they work generally is based on a simple p-value test of association among outcome (in this case, depression) and all genes based on SNPs. There is a high degree of mere chance association and false positives. Most GWA studies leave a lot to be desired.<p>This one looks more solid than most.  The p-value appears to be 10^-5 and they ran a replication data set as well.  Many GWASs report much less stringent p-value and many don&#x27;t run sub-replications.<p>One interesting aside about GWA studies: this may have changed recently, but I believe it used to be that any GWA study involving funding from the NIH was requires to post its data to a public, freely available database.  That always seemed a good practice to me and one that should be emulated in other sorts of studies involving government funding.  I wonder if this study is subject to that requirement.