Ratnasekera Pulindu, McNeney Brad
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.
Front Genet. 2021 Jan 13;11:600232. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2020.600232. eCollection 2020.
We investigate the impact of confounding on the results of a genome-wide association analysis by Beaty et al., which identified multiple single nucleotide polymorphisms that appeared to modify the effect of maternal smoking, alcohol consumption, or multivitamin supplementation on risk of cleft palate. The study sample of case-parent trios was primarily of European and East Asian ancestry, and the distribution of all three exposures differed by ancestral group. Such differences raise the possibility that confounders, rather than the exposures, are the risk modifiers and hence that the inference of gene-environment (×) interaction may be spurious. Our analyses generally confirmed the result of Beaty et al. and suggest the interaction × is driven by the European trios, whereas the East Asian trios were less informative.
我们研究了混杂因素对Beaty等人全基因组关联分析结果的影响，该分析确定了多个单核苷酸多态性，这些多态性似乎改变了母亲吸烟、饮酒或补充多种维生素对腭裂风险的影响。病例-双亲三联体的研究样本主要为欧洲和东亚血统，并且所有三种暴露因素的分布在不同血统群体中存在差异。这些差异增加了这样一种可能性，即混杂因素而非暴露因素才是风险修饰因素，因此基因-环境（×）相互作用的推断可能是虚假的。我们的分析总体上证实了Beaty等人的结果，并表明相互作用×是由欧洲三联体驱动的，而东亚三联体提供的信息较少。
