Genetic analysis of phenotypes derived from longitudinal data: Presentation Group 1 of Genetic Analysis Workshop 13

Flexible semiparametric analysis of longitudinal genetic studies by reduced rank smoothing

In family-based longitudinal genetic studies, investigators collect repeated measurements on a trait that changes with time along with genetic markers. Since repeated measurements are nested within subjects and subjects are nested within families, both the subject-level and measurement-level correlations must be taken into account in the statistical analysis to achieve more accurate estimation. In such studies, the primary interests include to test for quantitative trait locus (QTL) effect, and to estimate age-specific QTL effect and residual polygenic heritability function. We propose flexible semiparametric models along with their statistical estimation and hypothesis testing procedures for longitudinal genetic designs. We employ penalized splines to estimate nonparametric functions in the models. We find that misspecifying the baseline function or the genetic effect function in a parametric analysis may lead to substantially inflated or highly conservative type I error rate on testing and large mean squared error on estimation. We apply the proposed approaches to examine age-specific effects of genetic variants reported in a recent genome-wide association study of blood pressure collected in the Framingham Heart Study.

Semiparametric variance components models for genetic studies with longitudinal phenotypes

In a family-based genetic study such as the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), longitudinal trait measurements are recorded on subjects collected from families. Observations on subjects from the same family are correlated due to shared genetic composition or environmental factors such as diet. The data have a 3-level structure with measurements nested in subjects and subjects nested in families. We propose a semiparametric variance components model to describe phenotype observed at a time point as the sum of a nonparametric population mean function, a nonparametric random quantitative trait locus (QTL) effect, a shared environmental effect, a residual random polygenic effect and measurement error. One feature of the model is that we do not assume a parametric functional form of the age-dependent QTL effect, and we use penalized spline-based method to fit the model. We obtain nonparametric estimation of the QTL heritability defined as the ratio of the QTL variance to the total phenotypic variance. We use simulation studies to investigate performance of the proposed methods and apply these methods to the FHS systolic blood pressure data to estimate age-specific QTL effect at 62cM on chromosome 17.

Flexible estimation of covariance function by penalized spline with application to longitudinal family data

Longitudinal data are routinely collected in biomedical research studies. A natural model describing longitudinal data decomposes an individual's outcome as the sum of a population mean function and random subject-specific deviations. When parametric assumptions are too restrictive, methods modeling the population mean function and the random subject-specific functions nonparametrically are in demand. In some applications, it is desirable to estimate a covariance function of random subject-specific deviations. In this work, flexible yet computationally efficient methods are developed for a general class of semiparametric mixed effects models, where the functional forms of the population mean and the subject-specific curves are unspecified. We estimate nonparametric components of the model by penalized spline (P-spline, Biometrics 2001; 57:253-259), and reparameterize the random curve covariance function by a modified Cholesky decomposition (Biometrics 2002; 58:121-128) which allows for unconstrained estimation of a positive-semidefinite matrix. To provide smooth estimates, we penalize roughness of fitted curves and derive closed-form solutions in the maximization step of an EM algorithm. In addition, we present models and methods for longitudinal family data where subjects in a family are correlated and we decompose the covariance function into a subject-level source and observation-level source. We apply these methods to the multi-level Framingham Heart Study data to estimate age-specific heritability of systolic blood pressure nonparametrically.

The sumLINK statistic for genetic linkage analysis in the presence of heterogeneity

We present the "sumLINK" statistic--the sum of multipoint LOD scores for the subset of pedigrees with nominally significant linkage evidence at a given locus--as an alternative to common methods to identify susceptibility loci in the presence of heterogeneity. We also suggest the "sumLOD" statistic (the sum of positive multipoint LOD scores) as a companion to the sumLINK. sumLINK analysis identifies genetic regions of extreme consistency across pedigrees without regard to negative evidence from unlinked or uninformative pedigrees. Significance is determined by an innovative permutation procedure based on genome shuffling that randomizes linkage information across pedigrees. This procedure for generating the empirical null distribution may be useful for other linkage-based statistics as well. Using 500 genome-wide analyses of simulated null data, we show that the genome shuffling procedure results in the correct type 1 error rates for both the sumLINK and sumLOD. The power of the statistics was tested using 100 sets of simulated genome-wide data from the alternative hypothesis from GAW13. Finally, we illustrate the statistics in an analysis of 190 aggressive prostate cancer pedigrees from the International Consortium for Prostate Cancer Genetics, where we identified a new susceptibility locus. We propose that the sumLINK and sumLOD are ideal for collaborative projects and meta-analyses, as they do not require any sharing of identifiable data between contributing institutions. Further, loci identified with the sumLINK have good potential for gene localization via statistical recombinant mapping, as, by definition, several linked pedigrees contribute to each peak.