The weighted rank pairwise correlation statistic for linkage analysis: Simulation study and application to Alzheimer's disease

✍ Scribed by D. Commenges; J. Olson; E. Wijsman

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 663 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0741-0395
• DOI: 10.1002/gepi.1370110209

✦ Synopsis

The weighted rank pairwise correlation (WRPC) statistic has been proposed as a robust test of genetic linkage, particularly adapted to the analysis of large and complex pedigrees and for age-dependent and heterogeneous diseases. In this paper a simulation study is presented. Validity and power of the WRPC test are studied and compared to the Haseman-Elston sibpair method for various types of problems. The power of the WRPC test is slightly lower than the Haseman-Elston method for analyzing a large number of small randomly chosen pedigrees. It is higher however in presence of genetic heterogeneity or for analyzing large individual pedigrees. Recently, evidence of linkage of Alzheimer's disease with a locus on chromosome 14, D14s43, has been obtained by the Lod-score method. We reanalyze these data using the WRPC test, essentially confirming the results of the Lod-score method. The WRPC test statistic is higher than the equivalent Lod-score statistic for the two pedigrees which show strong evidence of linkage with the two methods. The global WRPC test statistic is slightly lower than the Lod-score test statistic. The W W C test, however, makes no hypothesis of a specific genetic transmission model and can be computed very quickly; in addition, an exact P-value can be computed by simulation for individual pedigrees.