Childhood Asthma GWAS

A new study published in the Jan 7th issue of New England Journal of Medicine used an Illumina chip to do a GWAS (genome wide association study) and found a link between some genes and childhood asthma using around 1700 subjects. Huge study with an expensive chip. Study must have been very expensive. The thing I like about these gene chips is that so much data is generated that you can get many papers out of these data. Even though the paper only discussed one gene, they can probably look back and find some other genes to look at later on, and maybe even other diseases if they have the patient's medical records. Wow, it's a gift that keeps on giving :) Though I'm by no means an expert statistician, the association kind of makes me wonder if it's by chance alone. I know the p-value must have been great, but one still wonders...

Sleiman PM, Flory J, Imielinski M, Bradfield JP, Annaiah K, Willis-Owen SA,
Wang K, Rafaels NM, Michel S, Bonnelykke K, Zhang H, Kim CE, Frackelton EC,
Glessner JT, Hou C, Otieno FG, Santa E, Thomas K, Smith RM, Glaberson WR, Garris
M, Chiavacci RM, Beaty TH, Ruczinski I, Orange JM, Allen J, Spergel JM,
Grundmeier R, Mathias RA, Christie JD, von Mutius E, Cookson WO, Kabesch M,
Moffatt MF, Grunstein MM, Barnes KC, Devoto M, Magnusson M, Li H, Grant SF,
Bisgaard H, Hakonarson H. Variants of DENND1B Associated with Asthma in Children.
N Engl J Med. 2009 Dec 23. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 20032318.