The Role of Family-Based Designs in Genome-Wide Association Studies

Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) offer an exciting and promising new research avenue for finding genes for complex diseases. Traditional case-control and cohort studies offer many advantages for such designs. Family-based association designs have long been attractive for their robustness properties, but robustness can mean a loss of power. In this paper we discuss some of the special features of family designs and their relevance in the era of GWAS.