• Environmental epidem
• genetic epidem

One limitation of interdisciplinarity is the misunderstanding regarding specific words and concepts from one discipline to the other.1 One way to circumvent this aspect is to incorporate the vocabulary of other disciplines when it corresponds to the appropriate concept. Gene–environment interaction is a popular topic for which there has been, to date, more reviews than established findings. There have been numerous attempts to represent what types of interactions could occur.2 Geneticists have proposed the term “candidate genes” to infer that there was a specific hypothesis, usually regarding the function of the gene, justifying its study for a given disease, whereas genome-wide comparisons have been called “agnostic”,3 which etymologically means without knowledge. In that context, testing a candidate gene–environment interaction is to test a hypothesis based on knowledge.4

It can be done basically two ways (table 1). The first is to study gene(s) in relation to a known environmental …