What GWAS Can't Tell Us (Yet)

A post at Mailund on the Internet reviews the common disease/common variant hypothesis of genome-wide association studies, and considers whether or not it's true. He points to a review article recently published in PLoS Genetics, which claims that so far, GWAS haven't been able to prove that common diseases are, in fact, caused by a few common variants (versus many rare variants). Mailund sums up the paper, arguing for more GWAS with larger sample sizes: " ... with the sample size we have used so far, we do not really have the power to detect the rare variants that would tell us if the common disease/common variant hypothesis is true or not."