Statistical Methods for Detecting Complex Genetic and Environmental Effects with Case-Control Mother-Child Pair Data

• Activity Number: 16
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 1, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Jinbo Chen and Dongyu Lin*+
• Companies: University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania
• Keywords: case-control studies ; mother-child pair data ; gene-gene interaction ; gene-environment interaction ; likelihood methods

Abstract

Case-control mother-child pair design, which recruits mother cases and controls and their children, is a popular study design for genetic association studies of pregnancy-related conditions. The contrast of gene and exposure frequencies in cases and controls and the partial family information contained in mother-child pairs offer great potential for disentangling effects of genetic and environmental variables. Accompanying this advantage is the challenge for statistical analysis: the involvement of both maternal and fetal genome and environmental exposures complicates the analysis. We propose unified likelihood-based methods for testing maternal-fetal gene-gene and gene-environment interactions and parent-of-origin effects of the fetal alleles.