July 30, 2013

Dr. Igor Burstyn, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Drexel University School of Public Health, collaborated with coauthors from the University of British Columbia, Canada to publish "Investigations of Gene–Disease Associations: Costs and Benefits of Environmental Data," in Epidemiology.

In this cohort-study setting, the authors considered the tradeoff between measuring only disease status and genotype for a larger study sample and measuring disease status, genotype, and environmental exposure for a smaller sample, under the gene-environment independence assumption. While further considering the impact of misclassification for environmental exposures, they identify circumstances under which higher power is achieved via the larger study sample without measurements of environmental exposure.