Assessing effects of disease genes and gene‐environment interactions: the case‐spouse design and the counterfactual‐control analysis

摘要

BackgroundAssessing joint genetic and environmental contributions to disease risk is the central issue in many genetic epidemiological studies. To characterise the effects of a gene, the case‐control study may suffer from the problem of population stratification bias. For a late onset disease, recruiting control subjects into case‐parents and case‐sibling studies may be difficult.