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A correlated frailty model with long‐term survivors for estimating the heritability of breast cancer
Author(s) -
Locatelli Isabella,
Rosina Alessandro,
Lichtenstein Paul,
Yashin Anatoli I.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
statistics in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.996
H-Index - 183
eISSN - 1097-0258
pISSN - 0277-6715
DOI - 10.1002/sim.2761
Subject(s) - heritability , markov chain monte carlo , breast cancer , markov chain , statistics , bayesian probability , cancer , medicine , twin study , population , covariate , demography , econometrics , mathematics , gerontology , biology , genetics , environmental health , sociology
The aim of this study is to investigate the role of genetics and environment in susceptibility to breast cancer (frailty). An interdisciplinary approach was adopted, combining a correlated frailty‐mixture model with genetic equations, allowing for decomposition of the frailty variance into genetic and environmental components. In addition, the possibility that a fraction of the population under study is ‘immune’ to the disease is evaluated, and changes in heritability estimates introducing a fraction of non‐susceptible individuals are determined. The methodology is applied to breast cancer data from the Swedish Twin Registry, including information about all female monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs born in Sweden between 1886 and 1967. The inferential problem is solved in a Bayesian framework and the numerical work is carried out using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.