Stephanie Calluori, Kaitlin Kirkpatrick Heimke, Charlisse Caga-anan, David Kaufman, Leah E. Mechanic, Kimberly A. McAllister
{"title":"Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Gene-Environment Interaction Research","authors":"Stephanie Calluori, Kaitlin Kirkpatrick Heimke, Charlisse Caga-anan, David Kaufman, Leah E. Mechanic, Kimberly A. McAllister","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22591","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22591","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Many complex disorders are impacted by the interplay of genetic and environmental factors. In gene-environment interactions (GxE), an individual's genetic and epigenetic makeup impacts the response to environmental exposures. Understanding GxE can impact health at the individual, community, and population levels. The rapid expansion of GxE research in biomedical studies for complex diseases raises many unique ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSIs) that have not been extensively explored and addressed. This review article builds on discussions originating from a workshop held by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in January 2022, entitled: “Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Gene-Environment Interaction Research.” We expand upon multiple key themes to inform broad recommendations and general guidance for addressing some of the most unique and challenging ELSI in GxE research. Key takeaways include strategies and approaches for establishing sustainable community partnerships, incorporating social determinants of health and environmental justice considerations into GxE research, effectively communicating and translating GxE findings, and addressing privacy and discrimination concerns in all GxE research going forward. Additional guidelines, resources, approaches, training, and capacity building are required to further support innovative GxE research and multidisciplinary GxE research teams.</p>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/gepi.22591","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142307513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marie-Sophie C. Ogloblinsky, Ozvan Bocher, Chaker Aloui, Anne-Louise Leutenegger, Ozan Ozisik, Anaïs Baudot, Elisabeth Tournier-Lasserve, Helen Castillo-Madeen, Daniel Lewinsohn, Donald F. Conrad, Emmanuelle Génin, Gaëlle Marenne
{"title":"PSAP-Genomic-Regions: A Method Leveraging Population Data to Prioritize Coding and Non-Coding Variants in Whole Genome Sequencing for Rare Disease Diagnosis","authors":"Marie-Sophie C. Ogloblinsky, Ozvan Bocher, Chaker Aloui, Anne-Louise Leutenegger, Ozan Ozisik, Anaïs Baudot, Elisabeth Tournier-Lasserve, Helen Castillo-Madeen, Daniel Lewinsohn, Donald F. Conrad, Emmanuelle Génin, Gaëlle Marenne","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22593","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22593","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The introduction of Next-Generation Sequencing technologies in the clinics has improved rare disease diagnosis. Nonetheless, for very heterogeneous or very rare diseases, more than half of cases still lack molecular diagnosis. Novel strategies are needed to prioritize variants within a single individual. The Population Sampling Probability (PSAP) method was developed to meet this aim but only for coding variants in exome data. Here, we propose an extension of the PSAP method to the non-coding genome called PSAP-genomic-regions. In this extension, instead of considering genes as testing units (PSAP-genes strategy), we use genomic regions defined over the whole genome that pinpoint potential functional constraints. We conceived an evaluation protocol for our method using artificially generated disease exomes and genomes, by inserting coding and non-coding pathogenic ClinVar variants in large data sets of exomes and genomes from the general population. PSAP-genomic-regions significantly improves the ranking of these variants compared to using a pathogenicity score alone. Using PSAP-genomic-regions, more than 50% of non-coding ClinVar variants were among the top 10 variants of the genome. On real sequencing data from six patients with Cerebral Small Vessel Disease and nine patients with male infertility, all causal variants were ranked in the top 100 variants with PSAP-genomic-regions. By revisiting the testing units used in the PSAP method to include non-coding variants, we have developed PSAP-genomic-regions, an efficient whole-genome prioritization tool which offers promising results for the diagnosis of unresolved rare diseases.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142345037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elisabeth A. Rosenthal, Li Hsu, Minta Thomas, Ulrike Peters, Christopher Kachulis, Karynne Patterson, Gail P. Jarvik
{"title":"Comparing Ancestry Standardization Approaches for a Transancestry Colorectal Cancer Polygenic Risk Score","authors":"Elisabeth A. Rosenthal, Li Hsu, Minta Thomas, Ulrike Peters, Christopher Kachulis, Karynne Patterson, Gail P. Jarvik","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22590","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22590","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a complex disease with monogenic, polygenic and environmental risk factors. Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) aim to identify high polygenic risk individuals. Due to differences in genetic background, PRS distributions vary by ancestry, necessitating standardization. We compared four <i>post-hoc</i> methods using the All of Us Research Program Whole Genome Sequence data for a transancestry CRC PRS. We contrasted results from linear models trained on A. the entire data or an ancestrally diverse subset AND B. covariates including principal components of ancestry or admixture. Standardization with the training subset also adjusted the variance. All methods performed similarly within ancestry, OR (95% C.I.) per s.d. change in PRS: African 1.5 (1.02, 2.08), Admixed American 2.2 (1.27, 3.85), European 1.6 (1.43, 1.89), and Middle Eastern 1.1 (0.71, 1.63). Using admixture and an ancestrally diverse training set provided distributions closest to standard Normal. Training a model on ancestrally diverse participants, adjusting both the mean and variance using admixture as covariates, created standard Normal <i>z</i>-scores, which can be used to identify patients at high polygenic risk. These scores can be incorporated into comprehensive risk calculation including other known risk factors, allowing for more precise risk estimates.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142307512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The 2024 Annual Meeting of the International Genetic Epidemiology Society","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22598","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22598","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"48 7","pages":"344-398"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142307514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Juyeon Kim, Young Sik Park, Jin Hee Kim, Yun-Chul Hong, Young-Chul Kim, In-Jae Oh, Sun Ha Jee, Myung-Ju Ahn, Jong-Won Kim, Jae-Joon Yim, Sungho Won
{"title":"Predicting Lung Cancer in Korean Never-Smokers With Polygenic Risk Scores","authors":"Juyeon Kim, Young Sik Park, Jin Hee Kim, Yun-Chul Hong, Young-Chul Kim, In-Jae Oh, Sun Ha Jee, Myung-Ju Ahn, Jong-Won Kim, Jae-Joon Yim, Sungho Won","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22586","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22586","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In the last few decades, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) with more than 10,000 subjects have identified several loci associated with lung cancer and these loci have been used to develop novel risk prediction tools for cancer. The present study aimed to establish a lung cancer prediction model for Korean never-smokers using polygenic risk scores (PRSs); PRSs were calculated using a pruning-thresholding-based approach based on 11 genome-wide significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Overall, the odds ratios tended to increase as PRSs were larger, with the odds ratio of the top 5% PRSs being 1.71 (95% confidence interval: 1.31–2.23) using the 40%–60% percentile group as the reference, and the area under the curve (AUC) of the prediction model being of 0.76 (95% confidence interval: 0.747–0.774). The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves of the prediction model with and without PRSs as covariates were compared using DeLong's test, and a significant difference was observed. Our results suggest that PRSs can be valuable tools for predicting the risk of lung cancer.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142284342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Annika Jaitner, Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova, Rachel M. Freathy, Jack Bowden
{"title":"Exploring and Accounting for Genetically Driven Effect Heterogeneity in Mendelian Randomization","authors":"Annika Jaitner, Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova, Rachel M. Freathy, Jack Bowden","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22587","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22587","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Mendelian randomization (MR) is a framework to estimate the causal effect of a modifiable health exposure, drug target or pharmaceutical intervention on a downstream outcome by using genetic variants as instrumental variables. A crucial assumption allowing estimation of the average causal effect in MR, termed <i>homogeneity</i>, is that the causal effect does not vary across levels of any instrument used in the analysis. In contrast, the science of pharmacogenetics seeks to actively uncover and exploit genetically driven effect heterogeneity for the purposes of precision medicine. In this study, we consider a recently proposed method for performing pharmacogenetic analysis on observational data—the Triangulation WIthin a STudy (TWIST) framework—and explore how it can be combined with traditional MR approaches to properly characterise average causal effects and genetically driven effect heterogeneity. We propose two new methods which not only estimate the genetically driven effect heterogeneity but also enable the estimation of a causal effect in the genetic group with and without the risk allele separately. Both methods utilise homogeneity-respecting and homogeneity-violating genetic variants and rely on a different set of assumptions. Using data from the ALSPAC study, we apply our new methods to estimate the causal effect of smoking before and during pregnancy on offspring birth weight in mothers whose genetics mean they find it (relatively) easier or harder to quit smoking.</p>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/gepi.22587","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142284341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Xiaoran Liang, Ninon Mounier, Nicolas Apfel, Sara Khalid, Timothy M. Frayling, Jack Bowden
{"title":"Using clustering of genetic variants in Mendelian randomization to interrogate the causal pathways underlying multimorbidity from a common risk factor","authors":"Xiaoran Liang, Ninon Mounier, Nicolas Apfel, Sara Khalid, Timothy M. Frayling, Jack Bowden","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22582","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22582","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Mendelian randomization (MR) is an epidemiological approach that utilizes genetic variants as instrumental variables to estimate the causal effect of an exposure on a health outcome. This paper investigates an MR scenario in which genetic variants aggregate into clusters that identify heterogeneous causal effects. Such variant clusters are likely to emerge if they affect the exposure and outcome via distinct biological pathways. In the multi-outcome MR framework, where a shared exposure causally impacts several disease outcomes simultaneously, these variant clusters can provide insights into the common disease-causing mechanisms underpinning the co-occurrence of multiple long-term conditions, a phenomenon known as multimorbidity. To identify such variant clusters, we adapt the general method of agglomerative hierarchical clustering to multi-sample summary-data MR setup, enabling cluster detection based on variant-specific ratio estimates. Particularly, we tailor the method for multi-outcome MR to aid in elucidating the causal pathways through which a common risk factor contributes to multiple morbidities. We show in simulations that our “MR-AHC” method detects clusters with high accuracy, outperforming the existing methods. We apply the method to investigate the causal effects of high body fat percentage on type 2 diabetes and osteoarthritis, uncovering interconnected cellular processes underlying this multimorbid disease pair.</p>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/gepi.22582","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141975524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Zoe E. Reed, Robyn E. Wootton, Jasmine N. Khouja, Tom G. Richardson, Eleanor Sanderson, George Davey Smith, Marcus R. Munafò
{"title":"Exploring pleiotropy in Mendelian randomisation analyses: What are genetic variants associated with ‘cigarette smoking initiation’ really capturing?","authors":"Zoe E. Reed, Robyn E. Wootton, Jasmine N. Khouja, Tom G. Richardson, Eleanor Sanderson, George Davey Smith, Marcus R. Munafò","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22583","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22583","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Genetic variants used as instruments for exposures in Mendelian randomisation (MR) analyses may have horizontal pleiotropic effects (i.e., influence outcomes via pathways other than through the exposure), which can undermine the validity of results. We examined the extent of this using smoking behaviours as an example. We first ran a phenome-wide association study in UK Biobank, using a smoking initiation genetic instrument. From the most strongly associated phenotypes, we selected those we considered could either plausibly or not plausibly be caused by smoking. We examined associations between genetic instruments for smoking initiation, smoking heaviness and lifetime smoking and these phenotypes in UK Biobank and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). We conducted negative control analyses among never smokers, including children. We found evidence that smoking-related genetic instruments were associated with phenotypes not plausibly caused by smoking in UK Biobank and (to a lesser extent) ALSPAC. We observed associations with phenotypes among never smokers. Our results demonstrate that smoking-related genetic risk scores are associated with unexpected phenotypes that are less plausibly downstream of smoking. This may reflect horizontal pleiotropy in these genetic risk scores, and we would encourage researchers to exercise caution this when using these and genetic risk scores for other complex behavioural exposures. We outline approaches that could be taken to consider this and overcome issues caused by potential horizontal pleiotropy, for example, in genetically informed causal inference analyses (e.g., MR) it is important to consider negative control outcomes and triangulation approaches, to avoid arriving at incorrect conclusions.</p>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7616876/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141888953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chin Yang Shapland, Apostolos Gkatzionis, Gibran Hemani, Kate Tilling
{"title":"Use of genetic correlations to examine selection bias","authors":"Chin Yang Shapland, Apostolos Gkatzionis, Gibran Hemani, Kate Tilling","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22584","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22584","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Observational studies are rarely representative of their target population because there are known and unknown factors that affect an individual's choice to participate (the selection mechanism). Selection can cause bias in a given analysis if the outcome is related to selection (conditional on the other variables in the model). Detecting and adjusting for selection bias in practice typically requires access to data on nonselected individuals. Here, we propose methods to detect selection bias in genetic studies by comparing correlations among genetic variants in the selected sample to those expected under no selection. We examine the use of four hypothesis tests to identify induced associations between genetic variants in the selected sample. We evaluate these approaches in Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, we use these approaches in an applied example using data from the UK Biobank (UKBB). The proposed tests suggested an association between alcohol consumption and selection into UKBB. Hence, UKBB analyses with alcohol consumption as the exposure or outcome may be biased by this selection.</p>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/gepi.22584","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141855281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Georg Hahn, Dmitry Prokopenko, Julian Hecker, Sharon M. Lutz, Kristina Mullin, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Stacia DeSantis, Christoph Lange
{"title":"Polygenic hazard score models for the prediction of Alzheimer's free survival using the lasso for Cox's proportional hazards model","authors":"Georg Hahn, Dmitry Prokopenko, Julian Hecker, Sharon M. Lutz, Kristina Mullin, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Stacia DeSantis, Christoph Lange","doi":"10.1002/gepi.22581","DOIUrl":"10.1002/gepi.22581","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The prediction of the susceptibility of an individual to a certain disease is an important and timely research area. An established technique is to estimate the risk of an individual with the help of an integrated risk model, that is, a polygenic risk score with added epidemiological covariates. However, integrated risk models do not capture any time dependence, and may provide a point estimate of the relative risk with respect to a reference population. The aim of this work is twofold. First, we explore and advocate the idea of predicting the time-dependent hazard and survival (defined as disease-free time) of an individual for the onset of a disease. This provides a practitioner with a much more differentiated view of absolute survival as a function of time. Second, to compute the time-dependent risk of an individual, we use published methodology to fit a Cox's proportional hazard model to data from a genetic SNP study of time to Alzheimer's disease (AD) onset, using the lasso to incorporate further epidemiological variables such as sex, APOE (apolipoprotein E, a genetic risk factor for AD) status, 10 leading principal components, and selected genomic loci. We apply the lasso for Cox's proportional hazards to a data set of 6792 AD patients (composed of 4102 cases and 2690 controls) and 87 covariates. We demonstrate that fitting a lasso model for Cox's proportional hazards allows one to obtain more accurate survival curves than with state-of-the-art (likelihood-based) methods. Moreover, the methodology allows one to obtain personalized survival curves for a patient, thus giving a much more differentiated view of the expected progression of a disease than the view offered by integrated risk models. The runtime to compute personalized survival curves is under a minute for the entire data set of AD patients, thus enabling it to handle datasets with 60,000–100,000 subjects in less than 1 h.</p>","PeriodicalId":12710,"journal":{"name":"Genetic Epidemiology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141563235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}