The importance of replication in gene-gene interaction studies: multifactor dimensionality reduction applied to a two-stage breast cancer case-control study

Abstract

A polygenic model has been proposed to explain the bulk of the genetic component of breast cancer aetiology and this is probably to include both main effects and interactions between multiple loci. However, the power to detect the interactions using traditional analytical methods is very limited for most studies. Multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) has been suggested to have increased power to detect interactions and is increasing being used in published studies. We applied MDR to a two-stage case-control breast cancer study conducted in Spain and Finland. In the stage 1 Spanish study of 864 cases and 845 controls, we evaluated interaction between 474 single-nucleotide polymorphisms i..