Gene-environment dependence creates spurious gene-environment interaction.

ABSTRACT: Gene-environment interactions have the potential to shed light on biological processes leading to disease and to improve the accuracy of epidemiological risk models. However, relatively few such interactions have yet been confirmed. In part this is because genetic markers such as tag SNPs are usually studied, rather than the causal variants themselves. Previous work has shown that this leads to substantial loss of power and increased sample size when gene and environment are independent. However, dependence between gene and environment can arise in several ways including mediation, pleiotropy, and confounding, and several examples of gene-environment interaction under gene-environment dependence have recently been published. Here we show that under gene-environment dependence, a statistica

SUBMITTER: Dudbridge F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4157149 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature