Genetic linkage analysis of longitudinal hypertension phenotypes using three summary measures

Background Longitudinal data often have multiple (repeated) measures recorded along a time trajectory. For example, the two cohorts from the Framingham Heart Study (GAW13 Problem 1) contain 21 and 5 repeated measures for hypertension phenotypes as well as epidemiological risk factors, respectively. Direct modelling of a large number of serially and biologically correlated traits in the context of linkage analysis can be prohibitively complex. Alternatively, we may consider using univariate transformation for linkage analysis of longitudinal repeated measures.