New Developments in Variance Component Models for Disentangling Maternal Genetic and Environmental Effects in Pedigree Analysis

• Activity Number: 257
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Jin Jin Zhou*+ and Kenneth Lange and Christina Palmer and Janet Suzanne Sinsheimer
• Companies: University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Los Angeles
• Keywords: Variance component model ; Asymptotic theory ; Maternal effects

Abstract

How to disentangle maternal inherited effects, prenatal and postnatal environment effects is an important problem in human genetic research. Studying individuals conceived by assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and their families provides an approach. Current analyses with ART families are limited to models with only fixed effects. Improved study designs and statistical methods need to be developed. We present a more general model where genetic and environmental effects are incorporated as mean or variance components depending on available data. Our model is an extension of the variance component model used in pedigree analysis. It is flexible and handles missing data. Through simulations and asymptotic theory, we tested the statistical properties of our method and evaluated its robustness to model misspecification.