Background: Genetic association studies using case-control designs are susceptible to false-positive and false-negative results if there are differences in genetic ancestry between cases and controls. We measured genetic ancestry among Latinas in a population-based case-control study of breast cancer and tested the association between ancestry and known breast cancer risk factors. We reasoned that if genetic ancestry is associated with known breast cancer risk factors, then the results of genetic association studies would be confounded. Methods: We used 44 ancestry informative markers to estimate individuals' genetic ancestry in 563 Latina participants. To test whether ancestry is a predictor of hormone therapy use, parity, and body mass index (BMI), we used multivariate logistic regression models to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) associated

Our data suggest a gene-by-environment interaction between CD14 genotypes and ETS, which affects pulmonary function and IgE levels among Latinos with asthma.

Beta2-adrenergic receptor (beta2AR) gene polymorphisms have been reported to be associated with various asthma-related traits in different racial/ethnic populations. However, it is unknown whether beta2AR genetic variants are associated with asthma in African Americans. In this study, we have examined whether there is association between beta2AR genetic variants and asthma in African Americans. We have recruited 264 African American asthmatic subjects and 176 matched healthy controls participating in the Study of African Americans, Asthma, Genes and Environments (SAGE). We genotyped seven known and recently identified beta2AR SNP variants, then tested genotype and haplotype association of asthma-related traits with the beta2AR SNPs in our African American cohort with adjustment of confounding effect due to admixture background and environmental risk factors. We found a significant association of the SNP -47 (Arg-19Cys) polymorphism with DeltaFEF(25-75), a measure of bronchodilator drug responsiveness, in African American asthmatics after correction for multiple testing (P = 0.001). We did not observe association of the SNP +46 (Arg16Gly) variant with asthma disease diagnosis and asthma-related phenotypes. In contrast to previous results between the Arg16Gly variant and traits related to bronchodilator responsiveness, our results indicate that the Arg-19Cys polymorphism in beta upstream peptide may play an important role in bronchodilator drug responsiveness in African American subjects. Our findings highlight the importance of investigating genetic risk factors for asthma in different populations.

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Case-control genetic association studies in admixed populations are known to be susceptible to genetic confounding due to population stratification. The transmission/disequilibrium test (TDT) approach can avoid this problem. However, the TDT is expensive and impractical for late-onset diseases. Case-control study designs, in which cases and controls are matched by admixture, can be an appealing and suitable alternative for genetic association studies in admixed populations. In this study, we applied this matching strategy when recruiting our African American participants in the Study of African American, Asthma, Genes and Environments (SAGE). Group admixture in this cohort consists of 83% African ancestry and 17% European ancestry, which was consistent with reports from other studies. By carrying out several complementary analyses, our results show that there is substructure in the cohort, but that the admixture distributions are almost identical in cases and controls, and also in cases only. We performed association tests for asthma-related traits with ancestry, and only found that FEV 1 , a measure for baseline pulmonary function, was associated with ancestry after adjusting for socio-economic and environmental risk factors (P = 0.01). We did not observe an excess of type I error rate in our association tests for ancestry informative markers (AIMs) and asthma-related phenotypes when ancestry was not adjusted in the analyses. Furthermore, using the association tests between genetic variants in a known asthma candidate gene, β 2 adrenergic receptor (β 2 AR) and ΔFEF 25-75 , an asthma-related phenotype, as an † Correspondence and reprint requests should be addressed to: