
Poverty leaves a mark on our genes - EndXA
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/nu-pla040419.php
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johncearls
The biggest problem with this study is they did not find what they hoped to
find, or at least what would have been most interesting. They broke their
subjects up into 4 groups based on early and late socioeconomic status,
High/High, Low/Low, High/Low, Low/High. They only found differences between
High/High and Low/Low. If there were some big differences differences between
DNAm resulting from early poverty, I would expect the Low/High to have had
significant differences. In other words they did not prove or disprove the
click-bait title "Poverty leaves a mark on our genes".

Of course the lack of "significant" differences could be a power (sample size)
issue as the number of upwardly (or downwardly) mobile people was half of what
the maintainers in either class was.

I agree this is a clickbait article, but I do not think the research (in the
paper) is bad. Hopefully this paper will be the basis of a higher powered
grant to follow up on their findings.

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cimmanom
Is it poverty per se? Or the chronic stress that poverty/low status causes?

Also, to what degree are these epigenetic changes (and more specifically, the
health conditions the article says they can cause/exacerbate) leading to
poverty and low socioeconomic status??

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cardmagic
"There is no nature vs. nurture”

Clickbait anyone?

This whole piece reeks of confusing causation with correlation.

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vignesh_m
Yeah they do nothing to even hint at possible correlation without causation

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SamReidHughes
For what it's worth SES has already been shown to correlate with methylation.

I don't have time to look at the source -- can somebody buy the paper, read
it, and tell me what they did to control for mutation load? That would be an
obvious potential cause, methylation processes are susceptible to that.

