[Commentary] GENETICALLY INFORMATIVE STUDIES OF ‘ENVIRONMENT’

Genetically Informative Designs for the Study of Behavioural Development

Invited commentary: from genome-wide association studies to gene-environment-wide interaction studies--challenges and opportunities.

The recent success of genome-wide association studies in finding susceptibility genes for many common diseases presents tremendous opportunities for epidemiologic studies of environmental risk factors. Analysis of gene-environment interactions, included in only a small fraction of epidemiologic studies until now, will begin to accelerate as investigators integrate analyses of genome-wide variat...

Does informative media commentary reduce politicians' incentives to pander?

Elections sometimes give policy-makers incentives to pander, i.e., to implement a policy that voters think is in their best interest, even though the policy-maker knows that a different policy is actually better for the voter. Pandering incentives are typically attenuated when voters learn, prior to the election, whether the policy chosen by the incumbent truly was in their best interest. This ...

Developmental change in the association between adolescent depressive symptoms and the home environment: results from a longitudinal, genetically informative investigation

BACKGROUND Depression is already highly prevalent by late adolescence, indicating that research into its developmental emergence should consider earlier risk factors and environmental contexts. The home environment is a key context for children and adolescents throughout development. However, the nature of relationships that exist between aspects of the home environment and the development of d...

Invited Commentary Invited Commentary: Genes, Environment, and Hybrid Vigor

In the 1950s, case-control studies of smoking and lung cancer established a paradigm for epidemiologic studies of risk factors for chronic diseases. Since then, thousands of case-control studies have examined possible associations of countless risk factors with numerous diseases, rarely finding associations as strong or consistent as that of smoking with lung cancer. Recently, researchers have ...