The Robust TDT-Type Test Under Informative Parental Missingness

• Activity Number: 526
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Jin-Hua Chen*+ and Kuang-Fu Cheng
• Companies: and China Medical University
• Keywords: Association test ; Case-parents study ; Informative missigness ; Robustness ; Transmission /disequilibrium test

Abstract

Many family-based association tests rely on the random transmission of alleles from parents to offspring. Among them, the transmission/disequilibrium test (TDT) may be considered to be the most popular statistical test. The TDT statistic was proposed to evaluate nonrandom transmission of alleles from parents to the diseased children. However, in family studies, parental genotypes are not always available. Quite often, the offspring genotype affects the severity of offspring phenotype or/and the age at onset and in turn affects the parental missingness. In such case, the nonrandom transmission of alleles may also occur even when the gene and disease are not associated. The usual TDT or its variations would produce excessive false positive conclusions in association studies. We propose a TDT-type association test which is not only simple in computation but also robust to the joint effect of population stratification and informative parental missingness. The test statistic does not rely on any model and also allows for having different mechanisms of parental missingness across subpopulations. We use a simulation study to compare the performance of new test and TDT method.