Heritability Estimation Based on Survival Data

• Activity Number: 659
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 8, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Malka Gorfine*+ and Li Hsu
• Companies: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
• Keywords: heritability ; survuval model ; GWAS ; genetic and environmental effects

Abstract

An important aspect of studying the etiology of complex disease is to understand the genetic and environmental contributions. Heritability is a commonly used measure for describing the phenotypic variation due to genetics. Recently, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified thousands of loci for many complex traits. However, these variants only capture a few percent of the estimated heritability of human complex traits and diseases, leaving open the question of where is the remaining heritability. Suggested explanations for this gap include gene-gene and gene-environmental interactions unidentified by the univariate GWAS analysis; unidentified contributions of rare genetic variants; or by overestimating the total heritability and creating "phantom heritability". In this talk we present a new method for estimation of heritability of complex disease traits based on a multivariate approach and time-to-event regression models.