ABSTRACT
Smoothing or Clustering ............................................................................475 26.5 Relationship to Coalescent Methods ..........................................................477 26.6 Haplotype Sharing Methods ......................................................................478 26.7 Other Issues ................................................................................................479 References ..............................................................................................................482
As we gain further knowledge regarding the underlying etiology of cancers and as technological advances continue for characterizing genetic variation, the study of the genetic component to cancer susceptibility and progression is becoming more salient. There has been some success at narrowing regions harboring cancerinfluencing loci with linkage analysis. For example, Witte et al.1 present compelling evidence for the identification of several loci for prostate cancer risk and tumor aggressiveness. However, there is an increasing need to use genetic association studies to evaluate genes conferring a modest risk or genes that interact with many of the already identified environmental risk factors for cancer. Genetic association studies broadly seek to demonstrate a relation between genetic variation and disease. Subsumed in these approaches are aims to determine regions of the genome that may influence genes, i.e., gene hunting, and to estimate relative risk and location of specific causal polymorphisms, i.e., gene characterization.
