Recent work shows strong evidence of ancestry-based assortative mating in spouse pairs of the older generation of the Framingham Heart Study. Here, we extend this analysis to two studies of human longevity: the Long Life Family Study (LLFS), and the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). In the LLFS, we identified 890 spouse pairs spanning two generations, while in the NECS we used data from 102...

UNLABELLED Although genetic association studies often test multiple, related phenotypes, few formal multivariate tests of association are available. We describe a test of association that can be efficiently applied to large population-based designs. AVAILABILITY A C++ implementation can be obtained from the authors.

In many applications, covariates possess a grouping structure that can be incorporated into the analysis to select important groups as well as important members of those groups. One important example arises in genetic association studies, where genes may have several variants capable of contributing to disease. An ideal penalized regression approach would select variables by balancing both the ...

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Multivariate phenotypes are frequently encountered in genetic association studies. The purpose of analyzing multivariate phenotypes usually includes discovery of novel genetic varian...

In genetic association studies a conventional test statistic is proportional to the correlation coefficient between the trait and the variant, with the result that it lacks power to detect association for low-frequency variants. Considering the link between the conventional association test statistics and the linkage disequilibrium measure r(2), we propose a test statistic analogous to the stan...

The approaches to identifying genes and genomic regions associated with human disease can be grouped into two categories: linkage analysis and genetic association analysis. Linkage analysis is useful for diseases of high penetrance that run strongly within families, but is limited in its ability to detect situations where there are multiple genes with smaller effects. An alternative is genetic ...

The obesity epidemic is attributable to dietary and behavioral trends acting on a person's genetic makeup to determine body mass and susceptibility to obesity-related disease. Common forms of obesity have a strong hereditary component, yet genetic pathways that contribute to obesity have not yet been elucidated. Many genetic association studies have been reported, but few have been successfully...

Genetic markers with rare variants are spread out in the genome, making it necessary and difficult to consider them in genetic association studies. Consequently, wisely combining rare variants into "composite" markers may facilitate meaningful analyses. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of analyzing rare variant data by incorporating the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator ...