GENEHUNTER. Although the score statistic is applicable
to general pedigrees, we considered only sibships partly
due to the fact that the IBD sharing probabilities from
GENEHUNTER are available for common relative pairs
(including sib pairs) only.
No significant linkage signal was found. There were two
markers whose p-values were less than 0.01 (Figure 1).
There are several possible causes to our failure to find any
significant linkage signal. The replicates chosen may not
contain any strong linkage signal. Or the way the phenotype
data were preprocessed was not appropriate. For
example, we did not consider the effect of age and gender.
As far as we know, how to incorporate covariates into the
linkage analysis of hypotension is an active field of
research [9-11]. We also suspect the use of sibship data,
instead of the pedigree data, reduces the power to detect
linkage.