Statistical Methods For Gene/Environment Interaction And

该项目旨在开发新的统计工具，用于评估基因-环境相互作用和遗传易感性。在改进研究设计和相关数据分析技术方面的工作已经取得进展。 遗传学家建议使用病例和他们的父母（病例-父母三元组）来研究遗传对疾病风险的影响，同时克服人口分层或混合的问题。如果一个人群由许多不同的亚群组成，这些亚群在基线疾病率和遗传变异的频率方面存在差异，病例对照研究可能会发现变异与疾病之间的关联，而这种关联仅仅是因为亚群的不同特征。这种关联缺乏病因学意义。案例-父母三元组设计可以消除这种潜在的误导性联想。我们正在研究的设计，增加了控制父母三元组的情况下，父母三元组，以克服单独使用的情况下，父母三元组的一些缺点。这样的设计应该更充分地将针对人口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.