Testing the significance of risk estimates for the predisposition of heterozygotes to common diseases.
A maximum-likelihood method has been used previously to estimate, from family studies, the relative risk of common disorders for heterozygous carriers of genes for certain autosomal recessive syndromes. In this paper statistical significance of relative risk estimates was evaluated using critical values from computer-generated sampling distributions of the test statistic. In several practical cases a significance test based on the computer-generated distribution was more conservative than a test which assumed normality for the sampling distribution.
D005808:Genes, Recessive; D005817:Genetic Counseling; D030342:Genetic Diseases, Inborn / Q000453:epidemiology*; D006579:Heterozygote; D006801:Humans; D012306:Risk; D013223:Statistics as Topic