Approved Research

Detecting Rare Haplotype Association with Multiple Correlated Continuous Phenotypes.

Lay summary

Health-related studies collect information on many traits/outcomes which are later used in the development and evaluation of treatment. Outcomes can be the disease status of an individual, or traits that are used as indicators of disease status. Systolic and diastolic blood pressures are examples of traits that are used to define hypertension. Several diseases/traits/outcomes are often correlated as these are collected on the same individual. Outcomes may also share a common underlying genetic mechanism. Hence, it is important to consider those outcomes jointly when trying to uncover the genetic variants associated with the outcomes. In particular, we are interested in finding the genetic variants that are associated with multiple brain imaging outcomes. We propose to develop new statistical methods to this end and apply them to the UK Biobank data.

Since the project is still in its infancy and we are only developing the method now, we need around 36 months to complete all the steps i.e. testing our method using simulations, comparing it to the existing association tests, application of the method to the UK Biobank data, and finally disseminating the findings of our project.