The Relationship Between Population Attributable Fraction and Heritability in Genetic Studies.

ABSTRACT: Population attributable fraction (PAF) has been widely used to quantify the proportion of disease risk in a population that can be attributed to risk factors in epidemiological studies. However, the use of PAF has been limited in assessing the contribution of genetic variants. Most notably, the PAF estimate is typically much larger than other commonly used measures, such as heritability, thereby raising the concern that PAF may overestimate the genetic contribution. In this paper, we show that PAF is a one-to-one function of heritability, and explain why PAF is larger than heritability. Further, we present an estimation procedure based on the summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to estimate the PAF of multiple correlated genetic variants for a binary outcome. Curr

SUBMITTER: Wang T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6174220 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature