On the power of epigenome-wide association studies using a disease-discordant twin design

摘要

Motivation: Many studies have investigated the association between DNA methylation alterations and disease occurrences using two design paradigms, traditional case-control and disease-discordant twins. In the disease-discordant twin design, the affected twin serves as the case and the unaffected twin serves as the control. Theoretically the twin design takes advantage of controlling for the shared genetic make-up, but it is still highly debatable if and how much researchers may benefit from such a design over the traditional case-control design.