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Let's go with your example. Let's say you have a 50% increased risk of alcoholism than the average population.

What does that mean?

If the probability of alcoholism is the general population is 1% ... well, that means yours is 1.5% ... or still ridiculously small.

Obviously those are just numbers I'm using to illustrate a point, but you see where I'm going with this.




While I agree with your general point, the lifetime prevalence of alcohol dependence is rather high; it is estimated to be 12.5% [1].

1 = http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17606817


"The heritability of prostate cancer is estimated to be 42-57%." My chance of prostate cancer is 25% instead of 17% for baseline european-ancestry males. I eat even more fruits and veggies and avoid animal fats now.




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