The Social and Genetic Epidemiology of Health Behaviors: An Integrated Approach

描述（由申请人提供）：社会人口统计学家感兴趣的大多数健康行为结果都受到环境和遗传因素的影响，但目前处理这两个感兴趣的预测因素的方法往往仅限于特定的（例如，兄弟姐妹或基于家庭的）研究设计。在提议的项目中，我们将开发一个多层次的模型，可以在多个研究设计中解释两种类型的预测因子，也许更重要的是，可以利用任何和所有可用的遗传信息（例如，估计的遗传信息）

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Most health behavior outcomes of interest to social demographers are affected by both environmental and genetic factors but current methods for handling these two predictors of interest tend to be restricted to specific (e.g., sibling or famil-based) study designs. In the proposed project, we will develop a multi-level model that can account for both types of predictors across multiple study designs and, perhaps even more importantly, can utilize any and all genetic information that is available (e.g., estimated genetic relationship between related AND unrelated pairs using genome-wide data or assumed relationship based on family structure). In this study, we first verify the proposed method via a series of detailed and extensive simulations. We will then demonstrate the usefulness of this method empirically using genetic and phenotypic data of interest to demographers (e.g., BMI and smoking) from two generations of family members and unrelated respondents in the Framingham Heart Study.