>This suggests that a low cholesterol level should be interpreted as a biomarker of illness severity. What if we are just looking at genetic variations? I feel

>This suggests that a low cholesterol level should be interpreted as a biomarker of illness severity. What if we are just looking at genetic variations? I feel like medical science in general does not appreciate the magnitude of confounding likely caused by unevenly distributed alleles of all sorts, which would explain a lot of the conflicting papers. And this comes from a reluctance to assign people to genetic groups - because they would almost certainly map at least somewhat to what we call races, and that would have other, potentially uncomfortable implications. It's a deeply seated bias that is so totally normalized as to be virtually undetectable by those who suffer from it, but in some ways it holds back extremely beneficial progress in medical acience.