Estimation of Genotype Relative Risks From Pedigree Data by Retrospective Likelihoods

Pedigrees collected for linkage studies are a valuable resource that could be used to estimate genetic relative risks (RRs) for genetic variants recently discovered in case-control genome wide association studies. To estimate RRs from highly ascertained pedigrees, a pedigree retrospective likelihood can be used, which adjusts for ascertainment by conditioning on the phenotypes of pedigree members. We explore a variety of approaches to compute the retrospective likelihood, and illustrate a Newton-Raphson method that is computationally efficient particularly for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) modeled as log-additive effect of alleles on the RR. We also illustrate, by simulations, that a naive composite likelihood method that can lead to biased RR estimates, mainly by not conditioning on the ascertainment process or as we propose the disease status of all pedigree members. Applications of the retrospective likelihood to pedigrees collected for a prostate cancer linkage study and recently reported risk-SNPs illustrate the utility of our methods, with results showing that the RRs estimated from the highly ascertained pedigrees are consistent with odds ratios estimated in case-control studies. We also evaluate the potential impact of residual correlations of disease risk among family members due to shared unmeasured risk factors (genetic or environmental) by allowing for a random baseline risk parameter. When modeling only the affected family members in our data, there was little evidence for heterogeneity in baseline risks across families. Genet. Epidemiol. 34 : 287-298, 2010. (C) 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.