The obesity epidemic is attributable to dietary and behavioral trends acting on a person's genetic makeup to determine body mass and susceptibility to obesity-related disease. Common forms of obesity have a strong hereditary component, yet genetic pathways that contribute to obesity have not yet been elucidated. Many genetic association studies have been reported, but few have been successfully...

UNLABELLED Although genetic association studies often test multiple, related phenotypes, few formal multivariate tests of association are available. We describe a test of association that can be efficiently applied to large population-based designs. AVAILABILITY A C++ implementation can be obtained from the authors.

In many applications, covariates possess a grouping structure that can be incorporated into the analysis to select important groups as well as important members of those groups. One important example arises in genetic association studies, where genes may have several variants capable of contributing to disease. An ideal penalized regression approach would select variables by balancing both the ...

The use of genetically isolated populations can empower next-generation association studies. In this review, we discuss the advantages of this approach and review study design and analytical considerations of genetic association studies focusing on isolates. We cite successful examples of using population isolates in association studies and outline potential ways forward.

OBJECTIVE In studies of associations between genetic factors and outcomes where change in phenotype is of interest, proper modeling of the data, particularly the treatment of baseline trait values, is required to draw valid conclusions. METHODS The authors compared models of blood pressure response to a cold pressor test with and without inclusion of baseline blood pressure as a regressor and...

Gene-environment interactions are of interest in genetic association studies for several reasons. First, the power to detect genetic effects may be substantially decreased if those effects differ according to environmental exposure and if no account is taken of this interaction with environmental exposure in the analysis. Second, such interactions may indicate a phenomenon of genuine biological...

Recent work shows strong evidence of ancestry-based assortative mating in spouse pairs of the older generation of the Framingham Heart Study. Here, we extend this analysis to two studies of human longevity: the Long Life Family Study (LLFS), and the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). In the LLFS, we identified 890 spouse pairs spanning two generations, while in the NECS we used data from 102...

Objectives: Genetic polymorphism interactions are among the important factors in affliction with complex diseases like Alzheimer’s disease. The important goal of genetic association studies is to identify a combination of polymorphisms and measure their importance in increasing the risk of occurrence of such diseases. In this study, feature selection approach of logic regression was used to ide...