Link Between Neanderthal DNA and Depression Risk

Re:Link Between Neanderthal DNA and Depression Risk by Houshalter on Saturday February 13, 2016 @12:45AM (#11092733)

Well the base rate of being depressed is low, so an increase of 1% is kind of significant. If the base rate is only 1%, then a 1% increase means you are twice as likely to be depressed!

I agree it's meaningless, in the sense that we have no idea what the cause is. It could be indirect, it could be random rather than anything special about neanderthals, it could be confounded with ethnicities that have higher neanderthal DNA, etc.

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Re:Link Between Neanderthal DNA and Depression Risk by azakai on Saturday February 13, 2016 @12:33PM (#11094800)

I think it's a 1% explanatory effect of the total variance. That means that 1% of the variance in the population (not the size of the effect) is explainable by this factor.

(Also, the base rate of depression is far more than 1%, see e.g. http://tech.mit.edu/V120/N3/dep1.3n.html - it's around 17% for just a major depressive episode.)

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