Transmission and Disequilibrium Tests Based on Sibship Data

Family-based tests such as the transmission and disequilibrium tests(TDT) have proved to be powerful tools in the search for disease genes. Unlike case-control studies, the tests are not affected by population admixture, which can lead to spurious association of multiple highly linked makers with disease-susceptible genes. Those tests have largely required knowledge of parental marker genotypes. However, parental data are often not available for late-onset diseases. In this article we propose sib-TDTs that overcome this problem by use of marker data from unaffected sib(s) instead of parents. To do this end, we first defined a Mantel-Haenszel-type statistic for each haplotype and then proposed two tests based on this statistic. Simulation studies suggest that the proposed tests are robust to population admixture and are monotone increasing as a relative risk increases irrespective of mode of inheritance. We also illustrated the proposed tests with data adopted from Yonsei Cardiovascular Genome Center