Assessing interactions of two loci (rs4242382 and rs10486567) in familial prostate cancer: statistical evaluation of epistasis.

Understanding the impact of multiple genetic variants and their interactions on the disease penetrance of familial multiple prostate cancer is very relevant to the overall understanding of carcinogenesis. We assessed the joint effect of two loci on rs4242382 at 8q24 and rs10486567 at 7p15.2 to this end. We analyzed the data from a Finnish family-based genetic study, which was composed of 947 men including 228 cases in 75 families, to evaluate the respective effects of the two loci on the disease penetrance; in particular, the occurrence and number of prostate cancer cases within a family were utilized to evaluate the interactions between the two loci under the additive and multiplicative Poisson regression models. The risk alleles A at rs4242382 (OR = 1.14, 95% CI 1.08-1.19, P