THE INFLUENCE OF RESPONSE BIAS ON SEGREGATION AND LINKAGE ANALYSIS

Response bias in epidemiologic studies can occur if affected individua ls are more (or less) likely to participate in a survey than their una ffected counterparts. To examine the effect of response bias in the co ntext of a family study, we conducted segregation and linkage analysis in all 1,000 individuals in the Problem 2 data set, and in two differ ent 65% samples: one sample consisting of 648 randomly selected indivi duals, and the other sample nonrandomly constructed so that individual s with high levels of Q1 were oversampled. In this simulation the abil ity to detect major genes for Q1-Q4 in segregation analysis and to lin k these putative major genes to genetic markers in linkage analysis wa s not markedly different between the 65% random and the 65% enriched s amples. (C) 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.