Age-of-onset of hypertension vs. a single measurement of systolic blood pressure in a combined linkage and segregation analysis

BACKGROUND: Often, multiple measures of a trait are available in a genetic linkage analysis. We compare Monte Carlo Markov chain analysis of two very different measures of hypertension in the simulated Genetic Analysis Workshop 13 data to examine how choice of measure affects the results. The measures selected were age-of-onset of hypertension and systolic blood pressure at first visit. RESULTS: In combined segregation and linkage analysis of the complete pedigrees using the first replicate of the simulated data with missing values, we found that the age-of-onset analysis was better at identifying "slope" genes, while the systolic blood pressure analysis was better at identifying "baseline" genes. CONCLUSION: Analysis of different trait measures may identify different trait-related genes. When linkage analysis is conducted on multiple trait measures, a linkage signal found for only one measure can represent a true trait locus.