Issue highlights

Jointly modeling clinical phenotype and disease status is a promising way to increase power to detect true associations between genetics and disease in genome-wide association studies. However, standard multivariate techniques fail to effectively solve this problem because their case-control status is discrete and not continuous. Standard approaches to estimate model parameters suffer ascertainment bias in case/control studies. The authors present a novel method that resolves both of these issues for simultaneous association testing of genetic variants that have both case status and a clinical covariate.