Journal de biométrie et biostatistique

Gene-environment Interaction Studies with Measurement Error Application in the Complex Diseases in the Newfoundland Populat ion: Environment and Genetics Study

Abstract

Taraneh Abarin

Newfoundland and Labrador NL has had the highest percentage of overweight/obese residents in Canada since 2007. This complex trait is determined by multiple genetic and environmental factors that interact with one another. The existing studies examine such factors under the assumption that they are measured accurately. However, error- prone environmental and genetic factors are unavoidable. The impact of ignoring these errors varies from bias to false results in detecting associations. Motivated by COD-ING study, we present methodologies to estimate model parameters, while accounting for measurement error and misclassification. We applied bias-corrected methods for three separate studies: candidate-gene association study and two gene-environment interaction models, where both environmental and genetic factors are subject to error. Our results based on simulation studies show that the proposed methodologies perform quite satisfactory.