Statistical Methods For Gene/Environment Interaction And

该项目旨在开发新的统计工具来评估基因-环境相互作用和遗传易感性。在改进研究设计和有关数据分析技术方面的工作正在进行。遗传学家在克服群体分层或混杂问题的同时，提出利用病例及其父母（病例-父母三联组）来研究遗传对疾病风险的影响。如果一个种群由若干不同的亚种群组成，这些亚种群在基线发病率和基因变异频率上存在差异，则病例对照研究可能会发现该变异与仅仅由于亚种群的不同特征而产生的疾病之间存在关联。这种关联缺乏病因学意义。案例-父母三位一体设计可以消除这种潜在的误导性联系。我们正在研究用对照双亲三元组来增加案例双亲三元组的设计，以克服单独使用案例双亲三元组的一些缺点。这种设计应该更充分地将对种群结构的保护扩展到基因型和暴露的研究。

This project seeks to develop new statistical tools for evaluating gene-environment interactions and genetic susceptibility. Work has proceeded in the area of improving study designs and associated techniques for data analysis. Geneticists have proposed using cases and their parents (case-parents triads) to study genetic effects on disease risk while overcoming the problem of population stratification or admixture. If a population consists of a number of distinct subpopulations that differ in baseline disease rates and in the frequency of a genetic variant, case-control studies may find associations between the variant and disease that arise simply because of the differing characteristics of the subpopulations. Such associations lack etiologic import. Case-parents triad designs can eliminate such potentially misleading associations. We are investigating designs that augment case-parents triads with control-parents triads to overcome some shortcomings of using case-parents triads alone. Such designs should more fully extend protection against population structure to studies of genotype and exposure together.