Mortality selection in a genetic sample and implications for association studies.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Mortality selection occurs when a non-random subset of a population of interest has died before data collection and is unobserved in the data. Mortality selection is of general concern in the social and health sciences, but has received little attention in genetic epidemiology. We tested the hypothesis that mortality selection may bias genetic association estimates, using data from the US-based Health and Retirement Study (HRS).

Methods

We tested mortality selection into the HRS genetic database by comparing HRS respondents who survive until genetic data collection in 2006 with those who do not. We next modelled mortality selection on demographic, health and social characteristics to calculate mortality selection probability weights. We analysed polygenic score as

SUBMITTER: Domingue BW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5837559 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature