Talk:Monoamine oxidase A

Comments

I strongly object to the deletion of an external link to an extended, completely relevant, all-inclusive, and purely factual bibliography on MAOA. I would not object, if any of these warring editors could provide a better bibliography. For years, Wikipedia’s entry on MAOA contained a number of complete falsehoods about MAOA from journals that I believe are not peer-reviewed. Eventually, a famous Harvard professor (Dr. Steven Pinker) repeated one such falsehood in a best-selling book. Even though I admire that writer, I felt compelled to write a critical essay. I believe the error was harmful to his career and reputation, and someone informed me that the error was removed from subsequent editions. As I began correcting the errors from the Wikipedia page, I had to endure multiple “edit wars” from poorly informed editors. As you can see from my talk page, one such individual demanded that I personally email a paper, using the edit war as a threat. In each case, I was correct, and my data prevailed. As a public service, I started a bibliography to help inform such people about this important area of research. The bibliography is too extended to be posted on Wikipedia, itself. (I should mention that Wikipedia is a punch line in my professional circle. Medical doctors rightly do not trust it and tend to rely on private research-review Web sites, like UpToDate.com.) It is true that Google Blogspot provides a free page, on which I have posted the bibliography, but I do not consider it to be a “blog.” You will not find daily ruminations about life or descriptions of breakfast on the site. Of course, I am the editor of the bibliography, although I shall include any and all relevant study and published commentary suggestions. The bibliography clearly does not fit a standard, common-sense definition of “conflict of interest” or Wikipedia’s own definition. The poorly informed editor who initially accused me of COI, (who is one of those spreading falsehoods and who engaged in a previous edit war with me, as shown on my talk page,) provided a link to Wikipedia’s definition, which says, “Using material you have written or published is allowed within reason…” My bibliography is not “self-serving” in any way. In fact, it is a major time sink, for which I have received nothing. My work is an attempt to save Wikipedia further embarrassment and prevent future edit wars with people unfamiliar with MAOA research. Indeed, the MAOA Wikipedia page contained so many errors prior to my editing that I became its primary editor. If there are falsehoods printed on the bibliography or its studies without my having noted them, then state what those falsehoods are. Believe me, you will not find the sort of egregious and offensive errors like the statement that 80% of Asians have the warrior gene, which was based on a copy-and-paste error that I had to correct from Wikipedia. Unsilencedscience 21:39, 31 January 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Unsilencedscience (talk • contribs)

Thanks for your comments, and thank you for your tenacity and desire in improving Wikipedia. Existing editors are asked to Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers. I apologize if you think you were unfairly criticized. You might be disappointed to see that WP:RS and WP:MEDRS like to rely on sources that have been published in the scholarly traditional ways. See WP:SPS for potential exceptions. And feel free to cite UpToDate. Can I help clarify anything? Best wishes and (hopefully) happy editing! Biosthmors (talk) 22:20, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

You are right that it is disappointing that Wikipedia editors judge information by platform rather than veracity or whether a work has received peer review. I thought the bibliography was the most appropriate response because it included both the peer-reviewed works that I cite and the free online non-peer-reviewed “journal” commentaries that Wikipedia’s amateur editors prefer. It is unfortunate that the external link was deleted because it detracts from the quality of information provided by Wikipedia. Unsilencedscience (talk • contribs) —Preceding undated comment added 00:07, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Please note that we do not prefer "non-peer-reviewed “journal” commentaries". We do prefer review articles and major textbooks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 17:19, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

We also don't care much about external links. We care mostly about the prose of the encyclopedia. Are you here to write an encyclopedia? We have a systematic way of writing Wikipedia, by relying on the sources that should be accurate, to keep things simple. If you're smart and motivated enough to publish a critique of existing sources, then I'm sure you can get that critique published in a reliable source or if you're already published in the field then identify yourself on your blog so we can attribute encyclopedic things to you. We simply don't have the time to peer review your research. But at this point I'm just speculating; I'm not sure how you want to change this article, at this point. This talk page is to discuss the prose of the Monoamine oxidase A, mostly. Biosthmors (talk) 18:28, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

it should be noted that "59% of Black men, 56% of Maori men, 54% of Chinese men, and 34% of Caucasian men carry the 3R allele" does not correspond to the correct allele frequencies in citation 18. The chinese men allele frequences are 77%, for example.

The 77% is a copy error in citation 18, I checked it out for another article and so did Unsilencedscience (see his post above). Raquel Baranow (talk) 23:21, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Having scour through the sources, it's obvious the figure for Chinese male, most likely came from the same research conducted on Taiwanese subjects. This is part of the quotation from the sources I found most relevant. "The study consisted of 214 subjects meeting DSM-IV criteria for alcoholism from northern Taiwan and 77 control individuals without history of alcoholism from Taipei." In none of these sources were there actual listed percentages of the study apart from the frequency of certain genes linked to alcohol tolerance. Do kindly provide the actual source showing the correct MAOA frequency of all the sample subjects examined in the study, which is not merely 77 as previously claimed, or we must assume such conclusions did not exist in the study. For now I will assume that the MZ Med Journal could have made an error in judgement, or it could just be a case of coincidence that the percentages actually matched up to the "77 control individuals without history of alcoholism from Taipei", and that they were spot in their assessment. In any case, there's some glaring misinterpretations made throughout this talk page. My proposal is to leave out the Taiwanese study till someone could provide concrete citations and sources on the actual percentages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.17.19.30 (talk) 21:15, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

I would like to thank Wikipedia and the New Zealand Medical Journal for the entertainment value of this “controversy.” The error is obvious. Wikipedia determined that my bibliography could not be linked from the MAOA page, yet the MAOA page is mired in a debate over one study of 77 people. Meanwhile, I have posted a table of all of the control subjects included in the bibliography, which provides an allele frequency estimates based on 18,066 people, so far. Wikipedia is an inferior source. Unsilencedscience 12:15, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

for those who care for chemistry more than politics

How much energy is released when MAO-A deaminates a molecule such as serotonin oxidatively? There could be a lot more specificity about the reactions MAO-A is involved in and less commentary about its prevelance in different ethnicities.RotogenRay (talk) 07:03, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Environmental factors are not inherited

I think that this entry is wrong:

Environmental factors, like childhood cognitive ability (IQ), can actually have substantial heritability.

1) The environment is not a heritable trait.

2) The cited paper concluded: Interestingly, results for PIQ differ from those for FSIQ and VIQ, in that no significant contribution of environment shared by siblings from the same family was detected.

3) The phrase may be reworded as: Childhood cognitive ability (IQ), can actually have substantial heritability, regardless of the environment. Cheers, BatteryIncluded (talk) 20:41, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

1) Yes, the environment is not supposed to be a heritable trait. Environmental factor is a misnomer because some of these factors certainly do have heritability. Heritability cannot be ruled out for any of these factors, but a traditional twins study is not a good design for determining the heritability of abusiveness. Genome-wide association studies with genome-wide complex trait analysis are proving heritability estimates for traits that were previously impossible to determine, like socio-economic status.

2) What that means is that the adolescent performance IQ had essentially no common environment influence (0.01), whereas full-scale IQ and verbal IQ had small common environment influence (0.18 and 0.26, respectively). That refers to the environment that an identical twin pair would have in common. So, it strengthens my point that heritability is strong.

3) Your reworded version is incorrect. It is not true that childhood IQ “can” have substantial heritability. It does. Saying “regardless of the environment” is redundant. It also misses my point that the term “environmental factor” is problematic and should not be misinterpreted. Ideally, I would remove the sentence, “Many more genes may be involved in violent behavior and environmental factors are also known to have a fundamental role.” It is verbatim from a news report, not a scientific study. I consider it an acceptable compromise to keep that statement with the following statement that clarifies that environmental factors are not wholly environmental, despite the term.

Unsilencedscience (talk) 2:20, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Unsilencedscience is right, the statement is silly, and it has no direct relation to the article topic. This is not the page to post general comments on the terms "environment" or "heritability". We assume people already know what these words mean, or alternatively that they go and look them up. I have no idea why you would even argue about childhood cognitive ability on the MAO-A talkpage. You can argue about it, of course, but you should do that over here. --dab (𒁳) 18:59, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

So detlete the entry. Cheers, BatteryIncluded (talk) 00:54, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

"0.00067% of Asian males"

How do you even come up with such a number? This is highly suspect. Is there a confidence interval to it? It means that you have to test 150'000 Asian males to find one guy with the allele. Surely this is completely confounded by false positives unless you test at least 1.5 million or so? Perahaps they did test millions of Asian men for this, idk, I'd just like to hear about the CI.

It doesn't help that the "reference" to this claim looks like [6][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. What, so ten studies came up with this exact result, independently? Or did somebody just decide that somehow ten footnotes is better than one, even if the information you are citing must be from some one among them? Because of what, so people can guess where the information came from? Look, I don't think this was the original idea behind using "references". --dab (𒁳) 19:08, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

From "[27]": We recruited 383 Han Chinese men in Taiwan: 143 ANX/DEP ALC and 240 healthy controls -- good look finding a "0.00067%" prevalence in that sample. At least they do mention Asians, some of the other references don't even have that. I am beginning to think I am looking at simple number vandalism. --dab (𒁳) 19:14, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

ok, I wanted to know. As far as I can see, this figure was first introduced by "Unsilencedscience" in this edit of 13 October 2012. The edit summary was "Undid revision 515087745 by Raquel Baranow", however, the edit was not a revert and apparently introduced this suspect figure, along with the WP:BOMBARDing, from scratch. If I am correct here, this is quite serious, as the numbers were not tweaked by a passing vandal but by somebody actively involved in arguing about the article. I will now wait for an explanation from Unsilencedscience as to what is going on here. --dab (𒁳) 19:34, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

You admitted that you made no attempt to check my calculations or sources. You seem upset that the number is too small. It only has two significant digits, which is perfectly reasonable. There is no need for a confidence interval because it is not an association. It is a simple allele frequency. Indeed, the allele is extremely rare in Asian men, and if one to bother oneself with actually checking all the sources, one would find the allele in only “one guy” in all of those studies. What would you prefer? The mode: zero? I could improve the accuracy by adding even more sources, but I guess that would only strengthen your belief that the number is vandalism. If Wikipedia prefers that all numbers come from a single source, then that is another source of embarrassment for anyone who uses Wikipedia as a source.

Unsilencedscience (talk) 11:10, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Why are we listing these percentages without explanation of their import? And why no explanation of the environmental factors that drive gene expression? I'm pretty sure we could, and should, make it more obvious to the reader that the "warrior gene" does not actually exist. — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 09:23, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

I removed the claim. The precision of the numbers imply that they are drawn from a specific source; and yet 10 cites were listed, none of which contain the cited estimate. If someone thinks these details on inter-population variation belong in the article they should put them back with a reference to their source.Kaficek (talk) 18:41, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

This may be a result of a typo error in the original reference, here’s a copy-paste I did in 2013 to correct it:

:it should be noted that "59% of Black men, 56% of Maori men, 54% of Chinese men, and 34% of Caucasian men carry the 3R allele" does not correspond to the correct allele frequencies in citation 18. The chinese men allele frequences are 77%, for example.

The 77% is a copy error in citation 18, I checked it out for another article and so did Unsilencedscience. Raquel Baranow (talk) 22:49, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

The 0.00067% figure is back in the article, along with the ridiculous citation stack. I haven't had time to check these references for the number, but if someone has, could they please state which one of these papers the figure comes from? If I can't find it during a literature check this week I'm going to delete the claim. If I can, I'm going to put the reference where it belongs, right beside the figure. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 14:34, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Having looked through most of the references cited in the previous version, I found that most of the claims about the different allele frequencies are not supported by the sources. "The 3.5R and 4R variants have been found to be more active..." is a very inflated reading of reference 10 (Sabol), which uses an in-vitro luciferase reporter assay in cultured neuroblastoma and choriocarcinoma cells, a very artificial system. "33-37% of European men" is not supported by either of the cited references, which were conducted on Americans and don't mention Europeans at all; reference 10 says nothing about Chinese men; the 62% of Maori men is accurate based on the cited source but raises WP:DUE issues because it's from a sample size of 18 men all from the same family; "Czechs, Polish, and Ukrainians" are not mentioned in any of the studies that I could access, and the 0.00067% figure that started this mess does not appear in any of those papers, either. References 17 and 18 didn't mention MAO at all and were on unrelated topics. I could not access references 12, 15, or 16, but the sloppiness in referencing all the detailed numbers in this section does not fill me with confidence.

tl;dr: I've removed all the percentages from this section because most of them are unsupported and all are of questionable importance to the topic of the article. I also removed all of the above references except reference 10, which supports the more modest claim that the promoter repeat allele frequency varies with ethnicity.

If anyone wants to restore these numbers, the burden of proof is on them to put a specific reference to a specific number.WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 22:26, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

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Unframed quotes in "warrior gene" section

"Monoamine oxidases (MAOs) are enzymes that are involved in the breakdown of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine and are, therefore, capable of influencing feelings, mood, and behaviour of individuals".[47] According to this, if there was a mutation to the gene that is involved in the process of promoting or inhibiting MAO enzymes, it could affect a person's personality or behaviour and could therefore make them more prone to aggression. A deficiency in the MAOA gene has shown higher levels of aggression in males, which could further stimulate more research into this controversial topic. "A deficiency in monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) has been shown to be associated with aggressive behaviour in men of a Dutch family".[48] << This paragraph contains quotes with no framing or in-text citations. They need rewording; I don't have time at the moment to follow the citations and make sure I accurately present who's saying what, but I'll be grateful if someone else does. Otherwise I'll try to track this back down and fix it. Jojopeanut (talk) 22:10, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

The 2R Allele

The fourth paragraph from the top ends with an assertion that 85% of Caucasian men have the 2R allele of the MAOA gene. But the first reference after that (ref 11, Beaver et al. 2012 titled "Exploring the association between the 2-repeat allele of the MAOA etc etc") says at the end of its abstract that 0.1% of Caucasian males carry the 2-repeat allele.

Am I missing something obvious? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.1.100.227 (talk) 21:38, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

I've read this part in the past, there's probably an edit somewhere that's changed this fallaciously. 84.64.95.134 (talk) 09:52, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Literally the last edit made (09:05, 5 January 2022‎ 100.14.147.45) changed the figure for prevalence in Caucasians for the 2R allele to 85% from 0.1%. They claim in the edit note "The first statement was false white male have a higher chance of MAO-A being in there blood". I don't think this person is distinguishing between the different alleles when they've chosen to make this edit I'll check the source and see if I can undo the edit if I confirm that this is wrong.84.64.95.134 (talk) 10:05, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Subtle changes

I have noticed in several wiki articles when race or culture or invoked, the article either seems to inflate or reduce african or african american significance in subtle ways. For instance, 62% of Maori men, 57% of Japanese men, and upwards of 62% of Chinese men have the 3R allele. It appears to me in order from highest to lowest, yet African-American men sit at the top with upwards of 59%, which would put them in 3rd, rather than 1st. This is subtle, but put African-American men first has the effect of visually inflating the significance compared to other groups. Not the first time I've seem this but still problematic. Yawosaahene (talk) 20:59, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

hetalia hooray(Hurra)!🇰🇷

This is the first time I've seen a really interesting article😲! It's amazing that you're looking at it in such detail😄😄! 112.148.214.4 (talk) 06:05, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

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