Effect of population stratification on false positive rates of population-based association analyses of quantitative traits

Abstract

It is now well established that population stratification can result in spurious association findings in genetic case-control studies. However, very few studies have addressed similar issues for mapping quantitative traits. Because quantitative phenotypes are often precursors of clinical endpoint traits and carry more information on within-genotype trait variability, it has been argued that studying these quantitative traits may be a more powerful strategy to map genes than the binary clinical endpoints. Thus, it is of interest to evaluate the adverse effects of population stratification on the analyses of quantitative traits. The popular statistical tests of association for quantitative traits using population level data are ANOVA, linear regression with an additive allelic effect and Kruskal-Wallis. We have theoretically studied the marginal effects of genetic heterogeneity and phenotypic heterogeneity as well as their joint effects on the false positive rates of these three tests. We have carried out extensive simulations under different genetic models and probability distributions of quantitative traits to assess the rate of false positives in the presence of population stratification. We find that the rate of false positives increases very quickly with simultaneous increase in differences in the standardized phenotypic means and marker allele frequencies in the subpopulations.