主 题：Heterogeneous Mediation Analysis on Epigenomic PTSD and Traumatic Stress in a Predominantly African American Cohort

主讲人：加州大学尔湾分校Annie Qu教授

主持人：统计学院林华珍教授

时间：2022年7月13日（周三）上午10:30-11:30

直播平台及会议ID：腾讯会议，ID: 190-681-360

主办单位：统计研究中心和统计学院 科研处

主讲人简介：

Annie Qu,加州大学尔湾分校统计系Chancellor’s Professor, 宾夕法尼亚州立大学统计学博士。他的研究重点是解决结构化和非结构化大规模数据的基本问题，开发个性化医疗的机器学习和算法、文本挖掘、推荐系统、医学影像数据和复杂异构数据的网络数据分析等方面的前沿统计方法和理论。新开发的方法能够从大量高维数据中提取必要的相关信息。她的研究在生物医学研究、基因组研究、公共卫生研究、社会和政治科学等多个领域都有影响。在加入加州大学尔湾分校之前，她是数据科学创始人统计学教授，也是伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校伊利诺伊州统计办公室主任。她被 UIUC 的 LAS 学院授予 Brad 和 Karen Smith 教授学者，并在 2004-2009 年获得 NSF Career award。她是国际数理统计学会（IMS）、美国统计学会（ASA）和美国科学促进会（AAAS）的Fellow,她还是 2024 年Medallion Award and Lecturer 获得者。

内容提要：

DNA methylation (DNAm) has been suggested to play a critical role in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), through mediating the relationship between trauma and PTSD. However, this underlying mechanism of PTSD for African Americans still remains unknown. To fill this gap, we investigate how DNAm mediates the effects of traumatic experiences on PTSD symptoms in the Detroit Neighborhood Health Study (DNHS) (2008–2013) which involves primarily African Americans adults. To achieve this, we develop a new mediation analysis approach for high-dimensional potential DNAm mediators. A key novelty of our method is that we consider heterogeneity in mediation effects across sub-populations. Specifically, mediators in different sub-populations could have opposite effects on the outcome, and thus could be difficult to identify under a traditional homogeneous model framework. In contrast, the proposed method can estimate heterogeneous mediation effects and identifies subpopulations in which individuals share similar effects. We also present our mediation analysis results of a dataset with 125 participants and more than 450, 000 CpG sites from the DNHS study. The proposed method finds three subgroups of subjects and identifies DNAm mediators corresponding to genes such as HSP90AA1 and NFATC1 which have been linked to PTSD symptoms in literature. Our finding could be useful in future finer-grained investigation of PTSD mechanism and in the development of new treatments for PTSD.