PLoS medicine
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Structural violence refers to the social structures that put people in harm's way. Farmer and colleagues describe the impact of social violence upon people living with HIV in the US and Rwanda.
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A limited number of studies have assessed the risk of common diseases when combining information from several predisposing polymorphisms. In most cases, individual polymorphisms only moderately increase risk (approximately 20%), and they are thought to be unhelpful in assessing individuals' risk clinically. The value of analyzing multiple alleles simultaneously is not well studied. This is often because, for any given disease, very few common risk alleles have been confirmed. ⋯ Combining information from several known common risk polymorphisms allows the identification of population subgroups with markedly differing risks of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those obtained using single polymorphisms. This approach may have a role in future preventative measures for common, polygenic diseases.
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ThePLoS Medicine editors, and Guest Editors Scott Stonington and Seth Holmes, introduce a special collection of articles examining the social structures that contribute to illness and health.