ACC cohort using a formal pathway-association method for case-control data sets43. This method examines whether statistics for a group of genes have modest yet consistent deviation from what is expected by chance, through shuffling case/control labels many times, each time recalculating P values for all SNPs. We confirmed that the set of cadherin genes is associated with ASDs (permutation P = 0.02), whereas the combined cadherin/neurexin genes show more significant association (permutation P = 0.002). Therefore, our pathway analysis suggests that neuronal cell-adhesion molecules may be collectively associated with ASDs.
