As genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have opened the door to systematic discovery of genetic factors for complex diseases, including cancers, the clinical utility of the findings remains to be determined. This is elegantly discussed in the article in this issue of ONCOLOGY by Stadler et al. The authors rightfully caution against the use of “personal genomic tests” based on cancer GWAS resu...

In a two stage genome-wide association study (2S-GWAS), a sample of cases and controls is allocated into two groups, and genetic markers are analyzed sequentially with respect to these groups. For such studies, experimental design considerations have primarily focused on minimizing study cost as a function of the allocation of cases and controls to stages, subject to a constraint on the power t...

BACKGROUND Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) provide a powerful means of identifying genetic variants that play a role in common diseases. Such studies present important ethical challenges. An increasing number of GWAS is taking place in lower income countries and there is a pressing need to identify the particular ethical challenges arising in such contexts. In this paper, we draw upon th...

We show here that combining two existing genome wide association studies (GWAS) yields additional biologically relevant information, beyond that obtained by either GWAS separately. We propose Joint GWAS Analysis, a method that compares a pair of GWAS for similarity among the top SNP associations, top genes identified, gene functional clusters, and top biological pathways. We show that Joint GWA...

objective(s) alzheimer’s disease (ad) is a complex disease with multifactorial etiology. inflammation has been proven to have an important role in the pathogenesis of ad. both ccr2 and ccr5 genes expression increase in ad patients comparing to control subjects. ccr5 gene encodes a protein which is a member of the beta chemokine receptors family of integral membrane proteins. ccr5-δ32 is a genet...

objective(s): multiple sclerosis (ms) is an autoimmune demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (cns) with unknown etiology. various genetics and environmental factors contribute to the pathogenesis of the disease. the interleukin-7 receptor alpha chain (il-7ra) was identified as the first non-major histocompatibility complex (non-mhc) ms susceptibility locus. in this study we are tr...

abstract   background: the disrupted-in-schizophrenia 1 (disc1) gene, on the chromosome position 1q42, was initially identified at the breakpoint of a balanced translocation, t(1,11)(q42.1q14.3), which segregated with major mental disorders in a large scottish family.   methods: our samples included 200 unrelated patients diagnosed with schizophrenia on the basis of dsm-iv criteria and 200 norm...

abstract background: schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder and numerous genes and loci are beleived to be involved in this disease. recent studies have reported a strong genetic association between dtnbp1 (dystrobrevin-binding protein 1) gene variants and schizophrenia. methods: in this research, we used a case-control study to establish the possible association between the p1635 (rs3213207...