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Letter

Nature Genetics 37, 1243–1246 (1 November 2005) | doi:10.1038/ng1653

Population structure, differential bias and genomic control in a large-scale, case-control association study

David G Clayton , Neil M Walker , Deborah J Smyth , Rebecca Pask , Jason D Cooper , Lisa M Maier , Luc J Smink , Alex C Lam , Nigel R Ovington , Helen E Stevens , Sarah Nutland , Joanna M M Howson , Malek Faham , Martin Moorhead , Hywel B Jones , Matthew Falkowski , Paul Hardenbol , Thomas D Willis & John A Todd

The main problems in drawing causal inferences from epidemiological case-control studies are confounding by unmeasured extraneous factors, selection bias and differential misclassification of exposure. In genetics the first of these, in the form of population structure, has dominated recent debate.