A knowledge-based method for association studies on complex diseases.

ABSTRACT: Complex disorders are a class of diseases whose phenotypic variance is caused by the interplay of multiple genetic and environmental factors. Analyzing the complexity underlying the genetic architecture of such traits may help develop more efficient diagnostic tests and therapeutic protocols. Despite the continuous advances in revealing the genetic basis of many of complex diseases using genome-wide association studies (GWAS), a major proportion of their genetic variance has remained unexplained, in part because GWAS are unable to reliably detect small individual risk contributions and to capture the underlying genetic heterogeneity. In this paper we describe a hypothesis-based method to analyze the association between multiple genetic factors and a complex phenotype. Starting from sets of

SUBMITTER: Nazarian A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3435396 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature