Abstract
Currently, the increasing interest of the influence of parental imprinting on heritability indicates the importance of incorporating imprinting effects into the mapping of association variants. In this paper, we extend the transmission disequilibrium test (TDT) to incorporate imprinting effects and develop new test statistics in a two-stage framework for association studies. Our test statistics enjoy the nature of familybased designs that need no assumption of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Also, the proposed methods accommodate families with one or more affected children. In the simulation study, we verify the validity of the proposed test statistics under various scenarios, and compare the powers of the proposed statistics with some existing test statistics. It is shown that our methods greatly improve the power for detecting association in the presence of imprinting effects.
