A new transmission test for affected sib-pair families

Family-based association approaches such as the transmission-disequilibrium test (TDT) are used extensively in the study of genetic traits because they are generally robust to the presence of population structure. However, these approaches necessarily involve recruitment of families, which is more costly and time-consuming than sampling unrelated individuals in the population-based approaches. Therefore, a family-based approach, which has high power, would be appealing because of the gain in time and cost due to the reduced sample size that is required to attain adequate power. Here we introduce a new family-based transmission test using the joint transmission status from affected sib pairs. We show that by including the transmission status of both siblings, our method gives higher power than the TDT design, while maintaining the correct type I error rate. We use the simulated data from affected sib-pair families with rheumatoid arthritis provided by Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 to illustrate our approach.