The estimation of sibling genetic risk parameters revisited.

This report points out that some sibling genetic risk parameters can be regarded as the ratios of the characteristic values in the ascertainment subpopulation. Based on this observation, we reconsider Olson and Cordell's ([2000] Genet. Epidemiol. 18:217-235) and Cordell and Olson's ([2000] Genet. Epidemiol. 18:307-321) estimators, and re-derive these estimators. Furthermore, we provide the closed-form variance estimators. Simulation results suggest that our proposed estimators perform very well, and single ascertainment may be better than complete ascertainment for estimating these genetic parameters. Copyright 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.