A whole-genome screen of a quantitative trait of age-related maculopathy in sibships from the Beaver Dam Eye Study.

Age-related maculopathy (ARM) is a leading cause of visual impairment among the elderly in Western populations. To identify ARM-susceptibility loci, we genotyped a subset of subjects from the Beaver Dam (WI) Eye Study and performed a model-free genomewide linkage analysis for markers linked to a quantitative measure of ARM. We initially genotyped 345 autosomal markers in 325 individuals (N=263 sib pairs) from 102 pedigrees.