Estimating the Heritability of Complex Diseases: Recent Developments

• 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): Thomas Scheike*+
• Companies: University of Copenhagen
• Keywords: competring risks ; heritability ; survival ; twin studies

Abstract

There has been considerable interest in studying the heritability of specific diseases. This is typically derived from family or twin studies, where the basic idea is to compare the correlation for different pairs that share different amount of genes (for example MZ and DZ twins).We here consider data from the Danish twin registry and discuss how to define heritability for breast cancer. The key point is that this should be done taking censoring as well as the competing risks due to eg. death into account. I will describe how to assess the dependence between twins on the probability scale and on the hazard scale and show that various models can be used to achieve sensible estimates of the dependence within MZ and DZ twin pairs.These dependence measures can subsequently by decomposed into a genetic and environmental component using random effects models. We also discuss how to deal with the left truncation present in the Nordic twin registries.