title: A correlated frailty model with long-term survivors for estimating the heritability of breast cancer.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, Statistic Unit, Rue du Bugnon 17, Lausanne 1005, Switzerland. isabella.locatelli@hospvd.ch
authors.forename: Isabella
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Locatelli
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rosina
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lichtenstein
authors.forename: Anatoli I
authors.initials: AI
authors.lastname: Yashin
mesh_terms: D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000209:etiology / Q000235:genetics*; D004198:Disease Susceptibility; D004200:Diseases in Twins / Q000235:genetics; D004781:Environmental Exposure; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D012042:Registries; D017741:Survivors; D013548:Sweden; D018433:Twin Studies as Topic