Genetics and Health

Bias in Chinese Genetics Studies

by Hsien Hsien Lei, PhD on November 25th, 2005

The biggest obstacle to my career success as a genetic epidemiologist was my inability to speak the language fluently in the countries my family and I have lived in since I finished grad school at Johns Hopkins in 1998 - Taiwan, Japan, and Vietnam. The same language hurdle between countries can lead to the seclusion of important findings with internationally known results being unrepresentative of that country’s general population.

John Ioannidis and collagues examined publication bias in Chinese genetic studies and found significant differences in studies published in international versus domestic journals. Either significant results are published in international journals and nonsignificant results in local literature, or the reverse.

Out of 161 Chinese studies, only 20 were indexed in PubMed, “a service of the National Library of Medicine that includes over 15 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s.” Overall, Chinese studies seemed to find more statistically significant positive gene-disease associations which was even more exaggerated in studies included in PubMed. The authors hypothesize that researchers are reluctant to submit and publish negative or inconclusive results that go against the findings of other English-language studies.

What are the implications for genetics research worldwide?

1. Researchers should consider language bias in meta-analyses of observational studies where conclusions might be skewed towards positive or negative results.
2. An international database of genetic data should be developed so that all investigators have access to additional unpublished or nonindexed data.

Improving science communication is a challenge not just between countries, but also between and within labs. Compound that with making scientific findings understandable to the public and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.

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POSTED IN: General Genetics and Health