This review summarizes current research on the genetics of insomnia, as genetic contributions are thought to be important for insomnia etiology. We begin by providing an overview of genetic methods (both quantitative and measured gene), followed by a discussion of the insomnia genetics literature with regard to each of the following common methodologies: twin and family studies, candidate gene ...

For a better understanding of the biological mechanisms involved in complex traits or diseases, networks are often useful tools in genetic studies: coexpression networks based on pairwise correlations between genes are commonly used. In case of a family-based design, it can be problematic when there is a large between-family variation in expression levels. We propose here a gene coexpression ne...

Many authors view schizophrenia as a neurodevelopmental disorder. Knowledge of whether patients have morphologic variants that occur during the development of different anatomic areas of the brain and an understanding of the relation between such variants and brain development or prenatal exposure to possible noxae could provide clues about the events that lead to schizophrenia. Nonspecific mor...

The Australian Twin Registry (ATR) has, since the late 1970s, enrolled more than 30,000 pairs of all zygosity types and ages willing to consider participation in approved research studies. Its core functions are the recruitment to, and maintenance of, an up-to-date database containing contact details and baseline information, and the management of fair and equitable access so as to enhance medi...

An increasingly popular research method for identifying etiologic heterogeneity in psychiatric illness has been to compare the frequency of a risk factor in affected individuals with no affected relatives (sporadic cases) and in affected individuals with one or more affected relatives (familial cases). This paper presents a power analysis of this familial vs sporadic method, assuming a multifac...

Following a suggestion in an Editorial in the British Journal of Anaesthesia in November of 1967, we wrote to this Journal and others in the United Kingdom, ofFering to provide a service of cholinesterase estimations and dibucaine and fluoride numbers for anaesthetists in the United Kingdom. It was hoped that, on their part, those who sent serum would co-operate with us in elucidating any inter...

OBJECTIVES To establish modifiable factors associated with active pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) among prisoners. DESIGN Retrospective matched case-control study. SETTING Nakuru GK prison in Kenya. SUBJECTS A total of 144 subjects (48 cases and 96 controls) were recruited into the study. Cases were adult prisoners who had at least two initial sputum specimens being Acid Fast Bacilli-positiv...

Pathway analysis, broadly defined as a group of methods incorporating a priori biological information from public databases, has emerged as a promising approach for analyzing high-dimensional genomic data. As part of Genetic Analysis Workshop 18, seven research groups applied pathway analysis techniques to whole-genome sequence data from the San Antonio Family Study. Overall, the groups found t...

Family studies are often used in genetic research to explore associations between genetic markers and various phenotypes. A commonly used design oversamples families enriched with the disease under study for efficient data collection and estimation. For instance, in a multiple cases family study, families are selected based on the number of affected relatives. In such cases, valid inference for...

PURPOSE Twin studies have demonstrated a high heritability for refractive error of up to 90%, but some family studies have suggested up to one-third of population variance is attributable to the effects of shared family environment. This large twin study aimed to explore the role of shared environment in refractive error. METHODS Refractive error was measured using autorefraction in 4602 subj...