Bayesian inference analyses of the polygenic architecture of rheumatoid arthritis.
Nature genetics 2011 ; 44: 483-9.
Stahl EA, Wegmann D, Trynka G, Gutierrez-Achury J, Do R, Voight BF, Kraft P, Chen R, Kallberg HJ, Kurreeman FA, Diabetes Genetics Replication and Meta-analysis Consortium, Myocardial Infarction Genetics Consortium, Kathiresan S, Wijmenga C, Gregersen PK, Alfredsson L, Siminovitch KA, Worthington J, de Bakker PI, Raychaudhuri S, Plenge RM
DOI : 10.1038/ng.2232
PubMed ID : 22446960
PMCID : PMC6560362
URL : https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.2232
Abstract
The genetic architectures of common, complex diseases are largely uncharacterized. We modeled the genetic architecture underlying genome-wide association study (GWAS) data for rheumatoid arthritis and developed a new method using polygenic risk-score analyses to infer the total liability-scale variance explained by associated GWAS SNPs. Using this method, we estimated that, together, thousands of SNPs from rheumatoid arthritis GWAS explain an additional 20% of disease risk (excluding known associated loci). We further tested this method on datasets for three additional diseases and obtained comparable estimates for celiac disease (43% excluding the major histocompatibility complex), myocardial infarction and coronary artery disease (48%) and type 2 diabetes (49%). Our results are consistent with simulated genetic models in which hundreds of associated loci harbor common causal variants and a smaller number of loci harbor multiple rare causal variants. These analyses suggest that GWAS will continue to be highly productive for the discovery of additional susceptibility loci for common diseases.