Analysis of familial breast cancer in genetic analysis workshop 9: summary of findings

As part of the 9th Genetic Analysis Workshop held in Val Morin, Quebec, October 16-18, 1994, four workshop participants analyzed a large breast cancer data set. This data set consisted of phenotype and genetic marker data on 3884 individuals in 214 families with at least four cases of breast cancer contributed by members of an international breast cancer consortium. Two of the four papers [Barrett and Rigby; Commenges; this issue] utilized variants of affected pair methods to assess linkage of breast/ovarian cancer to the 17q markers in the data set. The third paper by Bansal et al. used a Monte-Carlo approach to examine the question of intrafamilial clustering of breast and ovarian cancer. The last paper in the series [Leal and Ott] described a method of computing support intervals for risk estimates when there are uncertainties associated with the parameter estimates used to compute these risks.