A demonstration and findings of a statistical approach through reanalysis of inflammatory bowel disease data

We test the backward haplotype transmission association algorithm on genome-scan data previously studied by Rioux et al. [Rioux, J. D., et al. (2000) Am. J. Hum. Genet. 66, 1863-1870]. In their study, multipoint linkage methods were applied to affected sib-pairs with inflammatory bowel disease, and significant linkage evidence points to two susceptibility loci. After we apply our approach to these data with a global search accounting for both joint and marginal effects, very interesting results emerge, many of them intriguing. These results provide compelling support for the application of our approach to other data wherever applicable. Results from this project also make it clear that it is important to reinvestigate available family-based datasets that can be suitably reanalyzed. Given previously collected data in the literature, our approach, with its increased efficiency in using available resources, draws additional crucial information that may lead to novel and surprising results.