Detection of Parent-of-Origin Effects for Quantitative Traits in Complete and Incomplete Nuclear Families with Multiple Children

• Activity Number: 418
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Feng He*+ and Wing Kam Fung and Yue-Qing Hu and Ji-Yuan Zhou
• Companies: The University of Hong Kong and The University of Hong Kong and Nanjing Medical University and Southern Medical University
• Keywords: genomic imprinting ; missing genotype ; parent-asymmetry test ; parent-of-origin effects ; quantitative trait

Abstract

The parental-asymmetry test with case-parents trio data and its extensions to nuclear families with missing parental genotypes are simple and powerful for detecting parent-of-origin effects. However, these methods are suitable only for qualitative traits. In this paper, we first propose a novel class of PAT-type tests for quantitative traits based on nuclear families with both parents available, which is denoted by Q-PAT(c) for any constant c. When only one parent is available in each family with an arbitrary number of children, we develop Q-1-PAT(c) statistics for parent-of-origin effects. Combining families with both parents and families with only one parent, Q-C-PAT(c) statistics are proposed. Extensive simulation studies show that the proposed tests control the size well and have good performance. Power comparison also demonstrates that our method is much more powerful.