Estimating Modifying Effect of Age on Genetic and Environmental Variance Components in Twin Models.

ABSTRACT: Twin studies have been adopted for decades to disentangle the relative genetic and environmental contributions for a wide range of traits. However, heritability estimation based on the classical twin models does not take into account dynamic behavior of the variance components over age. Varying variance of the genetic component over age can imply the existence of gene-environment (G×E) interactions that general genome-wide association studies (GWAS) fail to capture, which may lead to the inconsistency of heritability estimates between twin design and GWAS. Existing parametricG×Einteraction models for twin studies are limited by assuming a linear or quadratic form of the variance curves with respect to a moderator that can, however, be overly restricted in reality. Here we propose spline-ba

SUBMITTER: He L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4827728 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature