Joint analysis of tightly linked SNPs in screening step of genome-wide association studies leads to increased power

Recent developments in genome-wide association studies ( GWAS) have lead to the localization of disease genes for many complex diseases. The scrutiny of the respective publications reveals, first, that statistical analysis is restricted typically to single-marker analysis in the first step, and that, second, the presence of multiple, independently associated SNPs within the same linkage disequilibrium ( LD) region is a common phenomenon. Motivated by this observation, we show through a power simulation study that a simultaneous analysis of tightly linked SNPs in the initial GWAS analysis step would lead to increased power, when compared with that in single-marker analysis. This is true for all the three approaches we considered ( implementations in BEAGLE, FAMHAP and UNPHASED). The best performance was obtained using a two-marker haplotype analysis. In conclusion, we would expect additional gene findings for re-analyzing successful GWAS with a multi-marker approach. European Journal of Human Genetics ( 2009) 17, 1043-1049; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2009.7; published online 18 February 2009