2018 Volume 25 Issue 2 Pages 104-111
A number of HLA alleles have been reported to be associated with various traits such as autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases, and adverse drug reaction in case-control association studies. Since there are many alleles at classical class I and class II HLA loci, a stringent significance level as corrected by the Bonferron method has been used in the statistical hypothesis testing to reduce false positives. However, the Bonferroni correction is too conservative to detect HLA alleles showing weak association, and thus many false negatives seem to have occurred in HLA-disease association studies. Here, I describe a chi-square test based on 2 by 2 contingency table for evaluating the association of each HLA allele at the locus with a dichotomous trait such as disease. In addition, I review the adjustment of significance level in association tests for loci with many alleles.
