Comparative assessment of different familial aggregation methods in the context of large and unstructured pedigrees

MOTIVATION: Familial aggregation analysis is an important early step for characterizing the genetic determinants of phenotypes in epidemiological studies. To facilitate this analysis, a collection of methods to detect familial aggregation in large pedigrees has been made available recently. However, efficacy of these methods in real world scenarios remains largely unknown. Here, we assess the performance of five aggregation methods to identify individuals or groups of related individuals affected by a Mendelian trait within a large set of decoys. We investigate method performance under a representative set of combinations of causal variant penetrance, trait prevalence and number of affected generations in the pedigree. These methods are then applied to assess familial aggregation of familial hypercholesterolemia and stroke, in the context of the Cooperative Health Research in South Tyrol (CHRIS) study. RESULTS: We find that in some situations statistical hypothesis testing with a binomial null distribution achieves performance similar to methods that are based on kinship information, while kinship based methods perform better when information is available on fewer generations. Potential case families from the CHRIS study are reported and the results are discussed taking into account insights from the performance assessment. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The familial aggregation analysis package is freely available at the Bioconductor repository, http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/FamAgg. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.