Discovering pure gene-environment interactions in blood pressure genome-wide association studies data: a two-step approach incorporating new statistics

BMC Proceedings

Proceedings

Inchi Hu¹  Shaw-Hwa Lo²  Chien-Hsun Huang²  Tian Zheng²  Maggie Haitian Wang³ 

[1] Department of ISOM, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR;Department of Statistics, Columbia University, 1255 Amsterdam Avenue, 10027-5927, New York, NY, USA;Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health and Primary Care, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR;

关键词: Systolic Blood Pressure;    Diastolic Blood Pressure;    Genetic Association;    Influence Measure;    Ribbon Synapse;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1753-6561-8-S1-S62

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Environment has long been known to play an important part in disease etiology. However, not many genome-wide association studies take environmental factors into consideration. There is also a need for new methods to identify the gene-environment interactions. In this study, we propose a 2-step approach incorporating an influence measure that capturespure gene-environment effect. We found that pure gene-age interaction has a stronger association than considering the genetic effect alone for systolic blood pressure, measured by counting the number of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)reaching a certain significance level. We analyzed the subjects by dividing them into two age groups and found no overlap in the top identified SNPs between them. This suggested that age might have a nonlinear effect on genetic association. Furthermore, the scores of the top SNPs for the two age subgroups were about 3times those obtained when using all subjects for systolic blood pressure. In addition, the scores of the older age subgroup were much higher than those for the younger group. The results suggest that genetic effects are stronger in older age and that genetic association studies should take environmental effects into consideration, especially age.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Wang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.