Most methods for testing association in the presence of linkage, using family-based studies, have been developed for continuous traits. FBAT (family-based association tests) is one of few methods appropriate for discrete outcomes. In this article we describe a new test of association in the presence of linkage for binary traits. We use a gamma random effects model in which association and linka...

Methods Five tagSNPs covering FLG have been genotyped in 237 trios from the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean population using a Sequenom panel. In addition, a genome-wide association study (GWAS) has also been done for the same trios in the large-scale GABRIEL project http://www. gabriel-fp6.org/. The polymorphisms (SNPs) included in FLG and FLG2 as well as those in the 3’ and 5’ UTR regions were extrac...

In genome wide association studies (GWAS), family-based studies tend to have less power to detect genetic associations than population-based studies, such as case-control studies. This can be an issue when testing if genes in a family-based GWAS have a direct effect on the phenotype of interest over and above their possible indirect effect through a secondary phenotype. When multiple SNPs are t...

In this paper we propose a multivariate extension of family-based association tests based on generalized estimating equations. The test can be applied to multiple phenotypes and to phenotypic data obtained in longitudinal studies without making any distributional assumptions for the phenotypic observations. Methods for handling missing phenotypic information are discussed. Further, we compare t...

Genome-wide association studies have been able to identify disease associations with many common variants; however most of the estimated genetic contribution explained by these variants appears to be very modest. Rare variants are thought to have larger effect sizes compared to common SNPs but effects of rare variants cannot be tested in the GWAS setting. Here we propose a novel method to test ...

Nonsyndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate (NSCL/P) are common birth defects with a complex etiology. Multiple interacting loci and possible environmental factors influence the risk of NSCL/P. 12 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 7 candidate genes were tested using an allele-specific primer extension for case-control and case-parent analyses in northeast China in 236 unrelated ...

Research has shown that motor and vocal tics fluctuate in frequency, intensity, and form in response to environmental and contextual cues. Behavioral models have proposed that some of the variation in tics may reflect context-dependent interactive learning processes such that once tics are performed, they are influenced by environmental contingencies. The current study describes the results of ...

CONTEXT The Wnt signaling pathways promote cell growth and are best known for their role in embryogenesis and cancer. Several lines of evidence suggest that these pathways might also be involved in bipolar disorder. OBJECTIVE To test for an association between candidate genes in the Wnt signaling pathways and disease susceptibility in a family-based bipolar disorder study. DESIGN Two hundre...