BACKGROUND During the past 5 years, high-throughput technologies have been successfully used by epidemiology studies, but almost all have focused on sequence variation through genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Today, the study of other genomic events is becoming more common in large-scale epidemiological studies. Many of these, unlike the single-nucleotide polymorphism studied in GWAS, ar...

Allergy and asthma are complex diseases influenced by many genes and molecular mechanisms. Recently a number of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have investigated asthma- and allergy-related phenotypes. Results suggest the existence of sub phenotypes of asthma and document a need to better define the disease. Genetics may also help to identify groups of patients susceptible for specific f...

That’s interesting. Care to elaborate? Part of the problem in trying to make a movie about real animals is that they aren’t actors. You can write a script — and there was one — but the chimps didn’t always follow it! So, like a good field worker, one had to adapt as the film footage came in and the story line changed. In this day and age of global warming, disease pandemics, and the like, it’s ...

As genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have opened the door to systematic discovery of genetic factors for complex diseases, including cancers, the clinical utility of the findings remains to be determined. This is elegantly discussed in the article in this issue of ONCOLOGY by Stadler et al. The authors rightfully caution against the use of “personal genomic tests” based on cancer GWAS resu...

In a two stage genome-wide association study (2S-GWAS), a sample of cases and controls is allocated into two groups, and genetic markers are analyzed sequentially with respect to these groups. For such studies, experimental design considerations have primarily focused on minimizing study cost as a function of the allocation of cases and controls to stages, subject to a constraint on the power t...

BACKGROUND Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) provide a powerful means of identifying genetic variants that play a role in common diseases. Such studies present important ethical challenges. An increasing number of GWAS is taking place in lower income countries and there is a pressing need to identify the particular ethical challenges arising in such contexts. In this paper, we draw upon th...

We show here that combining two existing genome wide association studies (GWAS) yields additional biologically relevant information, beyond that obtained by either GWAS separately. We propose Joint GWAS Analysis, a method that compares a pair of GWAS for similarity among the top SNP associations, top genes identified, gene functional clusters, and top biological pathways. We show that Joint GWA...