What are the strengths and disadvantage of conducting GWAS that includes related individuals?

GWAS has been done with family-based samples (e.g., data from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism [COGA] study). What are the strengths and disadvantage of conducting GWAS that includes related individuals?

in practice very few studies recruit cases and controls any more and we use everyone available

I think the “best” in terms of power is 1:1 - it maximizes the variance of the binomial. There may be reasons to deviate, e.g., if it’s easier to get controls

All the things that happens in the real world GWAS :slightly_frowning_face:

many cohorts use relatives - there are no disadvantages as long as you use software designed for this

there can be advantages but most software is designed to give a standard gwas and doesn’t provide the advantages

To be clear you CAN get 2 types of estimates - most GWAS with relatives do not plan to do this and want to estimate beta and se that is equivalent to an unrelated sample

I think the GWAS has more statistical power if including more samples like related individuals

that’s right! Usually, unless there are lots of relatives, relatedness is a nuisance. Not accounting for it will lead to an anti-conservative bias in the SEs, but it won’t necessarily bias the point estimate of the beta

Anybody who has missing data on the phenotype or on a covariate that you use in your model will be excluded from the GWAS by Plink.

family-based samples allow “within-family” estimates of GWAS betas. Those are protected from many of the biggest confounders in population-based GWASs (popstrat, genetic nurture, assortative mating). But they tend to be less powered - effective N is about 1/6 to 1/3 depending on the within-family design

actually the effective N is usually slightly less than the same N of unrelated people - but the difference is usually small