When drug treatments bias genetic studies: Mediation and interaction.

Clicks: 200
ID: 21246
2019
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Steady

Ranked #1,684 of 2,056 articles by views in PloS one

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 2,056 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Abstract
Increasingly, genetic analyses are conducted using information from subjects with established disease, who often receive concomitant treatment. We determined when treatment may bias genetic associations with a quantitative trait.Graph theory and simulated data were used to explore the impact of drug prescriptions on (longitudinal) genetic effect estimates. Analytic derivations of longitudinal genetic effects are presented, accounting for the following scenarios: 1) treatment allocated independently of a genetic variant, 2) treatment that mediates the genetic effect, 3) treatment that modifies the genetic effect. We additionally evaluate treatment modelling strategies on bias, the root mean squared error (RMSE), coverage, and rejection rate.We show that in the absence of treatment by gene effect modification or mediation, genetic effect estimates will be unbiased. In simulated data we found that conditional models accounting for treatment, confounding, and effect modification were generally unbiased with appropriate levels of confidence interval coverage. Ignoring the longitudinal nature of treatment prescription, however (e.g. because of incomplete records in longitudinal data), biased these conditional models to a similar degree (or worse) as simply ignoring treatment.The mere presence of (drug) treatment affecting a GWAS phenotype is insufficient to bias genetic associations with quantitative traits. While treatment may bias associations through effect modification and mediation, this might not occur frequently enough to warrant general concern at the presence of treated subjects in GWAS. Should treatment by gene effect modification or mediation be present however, current GWAS approaches attempting to adjust for treatment insufficiently account for the multivariable and longitudinal nature of treatment trajectories and hence genetic estimates may still be biased.
Reference Key
schmidt2019whenplos Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Schmidt, Amand F;Heerspink, Hiddo J L;Denig, Petra;Finan, Chris;Groenwold, Rolf H H;
Journal PloS one
Year 2019
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0221209
URL
Keywords Keywords not found

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.