I mean, look at this (from a random site that came up when I googled "genetic test exercise") Some of these are obviously genetically predictive (i.e. coeliac disease), but what even is "aerobic trainability"???pic.twitter.com/ut4YZJMX6p
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I mean, look at this (from a random site that came up when I googled "genetic test exercise") Some of these are obviously genetically predictive (i.e. coeliac disease), but what even is "aerobic trainability"???pic.twitter.com/ut4YZJMX6p
And then you look at the studies used to back things like this up and it's a n=30 trial with no blinding or control that finds non-significant or very minor differences in one measure of strength
Or it's a purely theoretical construct with no validation study And somehow the tests still cost hundreds of dollars!
It also comes back to the whole heritability problem. I imagine that your injury predisposition, for example, doesn't make much of a difference if you don't use protective equipment
So some of these traits might have a strong genetic influence, but identifying which genes are involved is hard, and environment might matter more anyway
This is a great example of the research in this area. 18 white men, no significance testing (group was "too small"), vague correlation between gene variants and reduced recovery time in a single exercise variable From this, expensive tests are madepic.twitter.com/M4SA2jfTwr
This one I also love. Tested whether a genetic test could help people to improve their resistance training. Groups either received genetic-matched advice, or genetic-mismatched advicepic.twitter.com/NZ6YsPVRUV
Now, forgetting that both of the two studies in this paper had 50%+ dropout, and not ITT, this sentence is, uh, interesting They're saying that the p-values in the matched group were bigger, thus genetic matching works Not exactly best practicepic.twitter.com/wZds22pQR9
If you look at the actual comparison between the two groups, there is some statistically significant improvement for the matched athletes, which makes that sentence even more confusingpic.twitter.com/HcQp5DlznX
Also worth noting that these differences weren't in actual scores, they were in PERCENTAGE CHANGE. So genetic matching improved athletes' scores by about 5% more over 8 weeks of training
So say you have two groups. Both start with a score of 10. What this would mean is that, after 8 weeks of this special training, one group scores 11 and the other one scores 10.95 Magic
But even better, the groups WEREN'T RANDOM. This is actually brilliant, because it shows how finicky trials can be The study groups were randomized to two INTERVENTIONS - either high or low intensity training
But the analysis variable is genetic testing. So actually what the researchers did was take their nice, randomized groups, and destroy them This is never mentioned in the study, but is a significant limitation
Anyway, these are two of the BETTER genetic testing studies because at least they trialled some kind of intervention Mostly you just see a big predictive algorithm built on white guys and some fairy fluff
It's amazing how much of genetic testing, outside of specific diseases and direct ancestry (parents, cousins etc) is just "hey look these genes correlate with that expression LET'S ASSUME CAUSATION THAT'S A GREAT IDEA"
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