SUMMARY Asthma, allergic rhinitis (AR) and atopic dermatitis also called eczema are allergic co-morbidites which are likely to depend on pleiotropic genetic effects as well as on specific genetic factors. After a previous genome-wide linkage screen conducted for asthma and AR in a sample of 295 French EGEA families ascertained through asthmatic subjects, the aim here was to search for genetic f...

OBJECTIVE This analysis tested whether comprehensive community interventions that focus on reducing alcohol availability and increasing substance abuse treatment can reduce alcohol related fatal traffic crashes. INTERVENTION Five of 14 communities awarded Fighting Back grants by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to reduce substance abuse and related problems attempted to reduce availability ...

We provide a general purpose family-based testing strategy for associating disease phenotypes with haplotypes when phase may be ambiguous and parental genotype data may be missing. These tests for linkage and association can be used in candidate gene studies with tightly linked markers. Our proposed weighted conditional approach extends the method described in Rabinowitz and Laird to multiple m...

BACKGROUND Pediatric bipolar I disorder (BP-I) and childhood schizophrenia (SZ) share certain symptoms (e.g., psychosis, aggression/irritability [A/I]), and the psychotic and A/I features are treated with neuroleptics in both disorders. Thus, it is of interest to examine the association of GAD1 to child BP-I because of its recently reported association to childhood SZ. METHODS Child BP-I prob...

A previous genome-wide linkage scan of bronchial hyper-responsiveness (BHR) in EGEA families, performed in presence of G x ETS (early life environmental tobacco smoke) exposure interaction, showed the strongest interaction in 17p11 region where linkage was detected only among unexposed siblings. Our goal was to conduct finescale mapping of 17p11 to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs...

The availability of a large number of dense SNPs, high-throughput genotyping and computation methods promotes the application of family-based association tests. While most of the current family-based analyses focus only on individual traits, joint analyses of correlated traits can extract more information and potentially improve the statistical power. However, current TDT-based methods are low-...

PURPOSE To test the association between myocilin gene (MYOC) polymorphisms and high myopia in Hong Kong Chinese by using family-based association study. METHODS A total of 162 Chinese nuclear families, consisting of 557 members, were recruited from an optometry clinic. Each family had two parents and at least one offspring with high myopia (defined as -6.00D or less for both eyes). All offspr...

Background: There are limited treatments available for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Studies have reported significant associations between the receptor genes of oxytocin (OT) and vasopressin (AVP) and ASD diagnosis, as well as ASD-related phenotypes. Researchers have also found the manipulation of these systems affects social and repetitive behaviors, core characteristics of ASD. Consequentl...