In: Nursing
Confounding is an important, but often confusing, concept. Choose one of these scenarios to state the confounder and briefly say why it is the confounder: 1) smoking and cancer, or 2) a causative gene allele and a nearby genetic marker
Confounder in a simple term means to cause to confuse something,thereby making it difficult to explain. 1) The confounder of smoking and cancer: The association between alchohol and cancer can be fully explain by the confounding effect of cigarettes use.The reason why smokers have a higher risk of cancer is because smoking damages cells so the damaged cells will eventually result in cancerous cells. Chemicals present in tobacco smoke harm the cleaning system that the body use to remove toxins ,this makes smokers less able to handle toxic chemicals. B) Genetic linkage is the inclination of alleles to move at nearby loci to be transmitted together, thereby two nearby loci are in linkage disequilibrium (LD) when recombination events occurs between them very infrequently. Alleles are always in phase with each other , if it's combines with 2 markers in a genetic study their association will be identical. Recombination events breaks down pairwise linkage between marker in the long run and it reduce the length of haplotypes. Also,the recombination activities are more likely to occur in hotspot regions in the genome than other regions. As a result of these markers without a recombination hotspot between them are linked over long period of time,the markers can now be grouped into a set of common haplotypes.