Everything else here starts from a variant. This starts from a topic — the kind of thing you would type into a search box — and asks which of our positions turn up in the same papers. A shared paper means somebody wrote about the two together. It is not a claim that the variant explains the topic, and for most of these the honest finding is that common variants explain very little of it.
The one axis you can check on yourself: variants that change the perception rather than the odds.
8 variants · 40 papers
See what connects →Two entirely different questions get asked about aging genetics, and the two condition pages this topic maps to answer them separately on purpose: how long people actually live (mostly disease genetics, not an aging dial), and how old someone measures biologically right now (telomere length, DNA-methylation clocks) — with telomerase's own genes, TERT and TERC, the one real link between the two.
0 variants · 0 papers
See what connects →Most of what this catalogue tracks is invisible to natural selection — an effect too small, or arriving too late in life, to move the odds of surviving or reproducing. A handful of variants are the exception: population geneticists have measured the direct fingerprint of selection acting on them within the last few thousand years, in some cases strong enough to push a single allele from rare to near-fixed.
46 variants · 79 papers
See what connects →A blood test reports vitamin D or B12 as a single number, and treats a low one as diet or sun exposure. Genetics moves that number too — mostly through how the body transports and converts a nutrient, not through how much of it someone eats.
38 variants · 193 papers
See what connects →The visible traits, which is why they are the ones people look up first.
24 variants · 79 papers
See what connects →Kidney function is reported as a single number, and that number is calculated rather than measured — which is where genetics, and an argument about race in medicine, both come in.
73 variants · 132 papers
See what connects →The organ people only think about when a blood test comes back odd. Two of its commonest numbers are partly inherited, which is why a raised enzyme is a question rather than a verdict.
66 variants · 249 papers
See what connects →Whether an infection passes or stays is decided as much by the host as by the microbe — and the host genes that decide it are usually the ones that show the immune system what it is fighting.
99 variants · 465 papers
See what connects →The largest study of the trait behind this found it was not one trait. “Worry” and “depressed affect” came apart in the data, which is a finding about the questionnaire as much as about the person.
17 variants · 46 papers
See what connects →Myopia rose faster in two generations than any inherited trait can rise. The genetics is real and it is not what changed.
33 variants · 91 papers
See what connects →Bone density is one of the more heritable things about a body — and the thing that actually matters, whether it breaks, is much harder to predict.
62 variants · 184 papers
See what connects →Allergy runs in families and rose too fast for genes to explain. Both of those are true, and holding them together is the whole subject.
39 variants · 71 papers
See what connects →Genetics has a great deal to say about the timing of reproduction across populations and almost nothing to say to one person trying to conceive.
55 variants · 97 papers
See what connects →The one reproductive event with a date attached, and the date is partly inherited. What follows from that is smaller than the internet suggests.
38 variants · 88 papers
See what connects →Bloating, dairy, gluten — the most-searched symptoms with real genetics behind some.
40 variants · 82 papers
See what connects →The supplement industry's favourite word, and what the data supports.
46 variants · 88 papers
See what connects →Talent tests sold to parents, and what the research behind them actually supports.
20 variants · 60 papers
See what connects →What actually changes in a brain over a lifetime, and which of it is written down in advance.
70 variants · 186 papers
See what connects →Whether the shape of a personality is partly inherited — and the twenty years of famous findings that turned out not to replicate.
12 variants · 26 papers
See what connects →Whether the difficulty of sitting down to study is partly inherited — a question with real, and repeatedly overstated, research behind it.
43 variants · 121 papers
See what connects →Showing 20 of 33 · page 1 of 2
A subject people actually search for — sleep, running, personality — paired with the variants that share a published paper with it, counted in Europe PMC.
No. A shared paper means researchers wrote about the topic and the variant together, not that the variant explains the topic — and for most of these, common variants explain very little of it.
Europe PMC is searched for that topic’s specific terms appearing in a paper’s title or abstract alongside a published rsID. Full text is deliberately excluded — it returns papers with an rsID buried in a supplementary table, not papers about the topic.
Recounted monthly, and the topic list itself is revised when the conversation moves — a subject that stops being talked about stops earning a place on it.