Genetic association tests in family samples for multi-category phenotypes

Abstract Background Advancements in statistical methods and sequencing technology have led to numerous novel discoveries in human genetics in the past two decades. Among phenotypes of interest, most attention has been given to studying genetic associations with continuous or binary traits. Efficient statistical methods have been proposed and are available for both type of traits under different study designs. However, for multinomial categorical traits in related samples, there is a lack of widely used efficient statistical methods and software. Results We propose an efficient score test to analyze a multinomial trait in family samples, in the context of genome-wide association/sequencing studies. An alternative Wald statistic is also proposed. We also extend the methodology to be applicable to ordinal traits. We performed extensive simulation studies to evaluate the type-I error of the score test, Wald test compared to the multinomial logistic regression for unrelated samples, under different allele frequency and study designs. We also evaluate the power of these methods. Results show that both the score and Wald tests have well-controlled type-I error rate, but the multinomial logistic regression has inflated type-I error rate when applied to family samples. We illustrated the application of the score test with an application to the Framingham Heart Study to uncover genetic variants associated with diabesity, a multi-category phenotype. Conclusion Both proposed tests have correct type-I error rate and similar power rate. However, because the Wald statistics rely on computer intensive estimation, it is less efficient than the score test in terms of applications to large-scale genetic association studies. We provide computer implementation for both multinomial and ordinal traits.