The 313 extended Framingham Heart Study families were analyzed to identify susceptibility loci for smoking rate by the Haseman-Elston regression methods implemented in GENEHUNTER and the SIBPAL program of S.A.G.E. Our genome-wide scan results provided evidence for significant linkage of smoking rate to chromosome 11 and suggestive linkage to chromosomes 4, 7, 9, 14, and 17. Additionally, we found several regions located on chromosomes 1, 6, 12, 15, 20, and 21 are potentially of interest with a significance level of <0.01. Interestingly, the genomic regions on chromosomes 7, 11, and 17 were identified by both the linkage methods. To our knowledge, most of the susceptibility regions for smoking rate identified in this study have not been reported previously and thus replication of these findings is an important next step.
