Linking gene regions jointly with environment and depression

Abstract Depression results from the interaction between genetic risk and exposure to environmental stressors. Efforts to study the joint effects of genes and environments on depression have largely focused on candidate gene approaches that rely on single genetic variants to characterize global gene function. Gene-region analyses, by contrast, evaluate the aggregate association between a set of genetic variants and a phenotype, and can be applied to gene x environment interaction models of depression. This chapter describes the utility and implementation of gene-region analyses, provides empirical examples of how these approaches have been used to study how genes increase risk for depression, and highlights several future directions for gene-region research that will enrich our understanding of the etiology of depression.