Heritability estimation of osteoarthritis in the pig-tailed macaque (Macaca nemestrina) with a look toward future data collection.

ABSTRACT: We examine heritability estimation of an ordinal trait for osteoarthritis, using a population of pig-tailed macaques from the Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC). This estimation is non-trivial, as the data consist of ordinal measurements on 16 intervertebral spaces throughout each macaque's spinal cord, with many missing values. We examine the resulting heritability estimates from different model choices, and also perform a simulation study to compare the performance of heritability estimation with these different models under specific known parameter values. Under both the real data analysis and the simulation study, we find that heritability estimates from an assumption of normality of the trait differ greatly from those of ordered probit regression, which considers the

SUBMITTER: Chi PB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4017820 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature