Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease

The article Genetic Influence on Health Does Race Matter infers that the objective of modern medicine is to predict an individual’s medical future. The identification of the risk factors forms the basis of coming up with effective treatment methods. A race is one of the indicators that influence the delivery of health services on Native Americans, African-Americans, White race and other groups.  Although the article acknowledges, there is significant knowledge/ understanding of the impacts of environmental factors on different health conditions, scant information on the influence of race. Nonetheless, the authors explain that there is a tendency to confuse between ancestry and race. The article defines ancestry as being the objective genetic relationships between people in a population. On the other hand, there is the definition of race as being the boundary of a population.

Race thus captures vital information on one’s biological and ancestry information thus forming an ideal ground of offering health care services. The article provides the example of blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) which is seen to work more effectively on European Americans as compared to African Americans.  While geographic ancestry can be applied in the making of genetic ancestry predictions, the article notes that such information may be imperfect. There is further the explanation that combined genetic variants trigger health condition such as cancer, obesity, and diabetes. It holds that genetic architecture can be used in the prediction of the most variant genes for different health conditions.  The article concludes by noting that race can effectively be used to determine genetic variants that trigger health condition such as diabetes. It further implies that geographic ancestry defers with race.