Of DNA and Demography

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Abstract
Over the past 40 years, the focus of demography has expanded beyond the causes and consequences of population growth (and how to stem it) into the causes and consequences of socioeconomic inequality and health disparities, giving rise to new data sources: large-scale longitudinal cohort studies. More recently, these studies have begun to collect a variety of biomarkers, including DNA and epigenetic measures. This chapter explains the three ways in which demographers have used genomic and epigenetic data (epigenetic dependent variables with socioeconomic independent variables, genomic control variables with biomedical dependent variables, and genomic independent variables with socioeconomic dependent variables) and the key findings from each type of research. It describes the shift from candidate gene studies to genome-wide association studies and explores ongoing challenges with using genome-wide association studies and the polygenic scores they produce in demographic research.

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