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0001-8244/00/0500-0235$18.00/0 © 2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation
Behavior Genetics, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2000
such as dyslexia, anxiety/depression, obesity, hyper-
tension, osteoporosis, and asthma are often measured
on continuous scales in both research and clinical set-
tings (e.g., reading ability, personality scales, body
size/weight, blood pressure, bone density, bronchial
responsiveness). Although virtually any continuous
measure can be easily dichotomized and thus analyzed
using the available suite of discrete measure tests,
such (arbitrary) data transformations generally result
in wasted information and a subsequent loss of sta-
tistical power to detect genetic effects (Neale and
Cardon, 1992).
Recently, Fulker et al. (1999) developed an ex-
tension of a commonly used linkage analysis approach
for assessment of allelic association in quantitative
traits. This method, embedded in the context of vari-
ance components modeling, makes use of means and
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