Dr. Bailey-Wilson is collaborating with Dr. Barbara Klein on analyses of existing family data from the Beaver Dam Eye Study. In this study, a private census of the town and township of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin was performed and all individuals between the ages of 43-84 were asked to enroll and were given extensive eye examinations and asked to fill out a questionnaire that measures environmental risk factor exposures. Of the 5925 eligible people, 4926 (83.1%) participated. Within this dataset, there are 1,247 people from 564 sibships with at least 2 members in each sibship having complete age, sex and examination results. These families represent an outstanding data resource for examining major genetic components to various eye diseases. In this fiscal year, we have examined familial correlations of many of the quantitative eye measurements and have begun power analyses of the nuclear cataract and cortical cataract traits to determine whether adequate power for linkage studies of these traits exists in this data set. In the future, we plan to perform additional power analyes and segregation analyses of additional possibly genetic traits available in these data.
