Sibling method increases risk assessment estimates for type 1 diabetes

We presented a risk assessment model to distinguish between type 1 diabetes (T1D) affected and unaffected siblings using only three single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes. In addition we calculated the heritability from genome-wide identity-by-descent (IBD) sharing between full siblings. We analyzed 1,253 pairs of affected individuals and their unaffected siblings (750 pairs from a discovery set and 503 pairs from a validation set) from the T1D Genetics Consortium (T1DGC), applying a logistic regression to analyze the area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). To calculate the heritability of T1D we used the Haseman-Elston regression analysis of the squared difference between the phenotypes of the pairs of siblings on the estimate of their genome-wide IBD proportion. The model with only 3 SNPs achieving an AUC of 0.75 in both datasets outperformed the model using the presence of the high-risk DR3/4 HLA genotype, namely AUC of 0.60. The heritability on the liability scale of T1D was approximately from 0.53 to 0.92, close to the results obtained from twin studies, ranging from 0.4 to 0.88.