October 16, 2014
Corresponding author: Olivia Fletcher Olivia.Fletcher@icr.ac.uk
Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre, The Institute of Cancer Research, London SW3 6JB, UK
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BMC Medicine 2014, 12:195 doi:10.1186/s12916-014-0195-1
Abstract
Gene-environment interactions have the potential to shed light on biological processes leading to disease, identify individuals for whom risk factors are most relevant, and improve the accuracy of epidemiological risk models. We review the progress that has been made in investigating gene-environment interactions in the field of breast cancer. Although several large-scale analyses have been carried out, only a few significant interactions have been reported. One of these, an interaction between CASP8-rs1045485 and alcohol consumption has been replicated, but others have not, including LSP1- rs3817198 and parity, and 1p11.2-rs11249433 and ever being parous. False positive interactions may arise if the gene and environment are correlated and the causal variant is less frequent than the tag SNP. We conclude that while much progress has been made in this area it is still too soon to tell whether gene-environment interactions will fulfil their promise. Before we can make this assessment we will need to replicate (or refute) the reported interactions, identify the causal variants that underlie tag-SNP associations and validate the next generation of epidemiological risk models.
⓿ The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/12/195
image source: How Can Future Research Efforts Address Combined Environmental Exposures?
