Comparison of longitudinal variance components and regression-based approaches for linkage detection on chromosome 17 for systolic blood pressure.

We compare two methods to detect genetic linkage by using serial observations of systolic blood pressure in pedigree data from the Framingham Heart Study focusing on chromosome 17. The first method is a variance components (VC) approach that incorporates longitudinal pedigree data, and the second method is a regression-based approach that summarizes all longitudinal measures in one single measure. No evidence of linkage was found either using the VC longitudinal approach or the regression-based approach, except when all time points were used from Cohorts 1 and 2 and only subjects aged 25 and 75 years were included.