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Carcinogenesis, Vol. 23, No. 12, 2139,
December 2002
© 2002 Oxford University Press
RESPONSE TO LETTER TO THE EDITOR |
Proper controls for SNP studies?
Unit of Environmental Cancer Epidemiology, International Agency for Research on Cancer, 150 cours Albert-Thomas, 69008 Lyon, France
Email: boffetta{at}iarc.fr, brennan{at}iarc.fr
Dear Sir,
We agree with Hemminki and Försti that, for association studies aimed at establishing whether an SNP modifies the risk of a disease, the use of a convenient, large control group may be justified, as long as the genotype distribution follows the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium. Deciding whether confounding by ethnicity may be present, however, is not trivial when (i) the underlying population is ethnically heterogeneous; (ii) no individual information is available on the ethnic distribution of the control group; and (iii) participation in the control group might be associated with ethnicity (e.g. via social class). As in all observational research, in SNP studies there are no all-purpose solutions, rather compromises between resources, availability of subjects and samples, and approaches to control biases. Therefore, we plea for a careful consideration of issues pertaining to the study design, including the choice of control groups and the size of the study populations, no matter which is the purpose of the study.
Received August 18, 2002; accepted August 18, 2002.
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