Analysis of Gene-Environment Interaction with Family Data: Using Unascertained Samples with Binary Outcome

• Activity Number: 235
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Gourab De*+ and Nan Laird
• Companies: Harvard University and Harvard University
• Keywords: CPG ; family-based

Abstract

Most complex disorders are caused by a complex interplay between several genetic and environment factors. Several procedures can be considered to get reliable estimates for these interaction parameters. In this paper we consider using the CPG likelihood to estimate gene-environment interaction parameters and evaluate performance of estimation procedure for unrestricted family-based samples. In the first section we examine improvement in estimation after using genotypes of unaffected offsprings under different settings. In the second section we discuss the issue of using multiple siblings in a family and examine the effect using simulated data. Finally we introduce a novel method to include families with missing parents into the analysis and we evaluate this method using simulation. We apply our methods on a real dataset on two Senegalese villages with Malaria as the trait.