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A flexible Bayesian model for studying gene-environment interaction.

ABSTRACT: An important follow-up step after genetic markers are found to be associated with a disease outcome is a more detailed analysis investigating how the implicated gene or chromosomal region and an established environment risk factor interact to influence the disease risk. The standard approach to this study of gene-environment interaction considers one genetic marker at a time and therefore could misrepresent and underestimate the genetic contribution to the joint effect when one or more functional loci, some of which might not be genotyped, exist in the region and interact with the environment risk factor in a complex way. We develop a more global approach based on a Bayesian model that uses a latent genetic profile variable to capture all of the genetic variation in the entire targeted region and allows the environment effect to vary across different genetic profile categories. We also propose a resampling-based test derived from the developed Bayesian model for the detection of gene-environment interaction. Using data collected in the Environment and Genetics in Lung Cancer Etiology (EAGLE) study, we apply the Bayesian model to evaluate the joint effect of smoking intensity and genetic variants in the 15q25.1 region, which contains a cluster of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor genes and has been shown to be associated with both lung cancer and smoking behavior. We find evidence for gene-environment interaction (P-value?=?0.016), with the smoking effect appearing to be stronger in subjects with a genetic profile associated with a higher lung cancer risk; the conventional test of gene-environment interaction based on the single-marker approach is far from significant.

SUBMITTER: Yu K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3266891 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A flexible Bayesian model for studying gene-environment interaction.

Yu Kai K Wacholder Sholom S Wheeler William W Wang Zhaoming Z Caporaso Neil N Landi Maria Teresa MT Liang Faming F

PLoS genetics 20120126 1

An important follow-up step after genetic markers are found to be associated with a disease outcome is a more detailed analysis investigating how the implicated gene or chromosomal region and an established environment risk factor interact to influence the disease risk. The standard approach to this study of gene-environment interaction considers one genetic marker at a time and therefore could misrepresent and underestimate the genetic contribution to the joint effect when one or more functiona ...[more]

PMID: 22291610

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Project description:The two-phase sampling design is a cost-efficient way of collecting expensive covariate information on a judiciously selected sub-sample. It is natural to apply such a strategy for collecting genetic data in a sub-sample enriched for exposure to environmental factors for gene-environment interaction (G × E) analysis. In this paper, we consider two-phase studies of G × E interaction where phase I data are available on exposure, covariates and disease status. Stratified sampling is done to prioritize individuals for genotyping at phase II conditional on disease and exposure. We consider a Bayesian analysis based on the joint retrospective likelihood of phase I and phase II data. We address several important statistical issues: (i) we consider a model with multiple genes, environmental factors and their pairwise interactions. We employ a Bayesian variable selection algorithm to reduce the dimensionality of this potentially high-dimensional model; (ii) we use the assumption of gene-gene and gene-environment independence to trade-off between bias and efficiency for estimating the interaction parameters through use of hierarchical priors reflecting this assumption; (iii) we posit a flexible model for the joint distribution of the phase I categorical variables using the non-parametric Bayes construction of Dunson and Xing (2009). We carry out a small-scale simulation study to compare the proposed Bayesian method with weighted likelihood and pseudo likelihood methods that are standard choices for analyzing two-phase data. The motivating example originates from an ongoing case-control study of colorectal cancer, where the goal is to explore the interaction between the use of statins (a drug used for lowering lipid levels) and 294 genetic markers in the lipid metabolism/cholesterol synthesis pathway. The sub-sample of cases and controls on which these genetic markers were measured is enriched in terms of statin users. The example and simulation results illustrate that the proposed Bayesian approach has a number of advantages for characterizing joint effects of genotype and exposure over existing alternatives and makes efficient use of all available data in both phases.

Dataset Information

A flexible Bayesian model for studying gene-environment interaction.

Publications

A flexible Bayesian model for studying gene-environment interaction.

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