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.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS280 the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
