Disease susceptibility genes and the sib-pair method: a review of recent methodology

There is now a considerable body of literature which describes and analyses various methods of testing for the presence of disease susceptibility genes by examining the degree of HLA haplotype sharing of parental haplotypes over random expectations amongst affected siblings. We here survey a number of improvements, generalizations and extensions of the earlier reported methods with the aim of bringing them to the attention of those who are collecting HLA or other haplotype data on familial disease.