A new score statistic to test for association given linkage in affected sibling pair-control designs

To detect association of the DR1 allele with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) given linkage in the affected sibling pairs of the replicates of Problem 3 of Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 (GAW15), we propose a new score statistic that takes into account the linkage information. We knew the answers. Linkage studies are often followed by case-control association studies of candidate genes located under the peak to identify the causes of a linkage peak. One strategy is to type the affected sibling pairs from the original linkage study and a set of unrelated controls for single-nuclear polymorphisms describing the genetic variation of these genes. For this affected sibling pair-control design, we propose a relative-risk model for the relationship between the disease outcomes of sibling pairs and their genotypes and identity-by-descent status at the locus of interest. From this model, we derive a score statistic to analyze genetic association given linkage. We compare the performance of the new statistic to the method of Li et al. and to a standard association analysis that neglects the information on the identity-by-descent status of the sibling pair. We conclude that for the GAW15 data the new method performs well and that methods that use the linkage information may be more efficient than standard comparisons of genotypes in cases and controls.