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Genome-wide association meta-analysis identifies new endometriosis risk loci

Abstract

We conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 4,604 endometriosis cases and 9,393 controls of Japanese1 and European2 ancestry. We show that rs12700667 on chromosome 7p15.2, previously found to associate with disease in Europeans, replicates in Japanese (P = 3.6 × 10−3), and we confirm association of rs7521902 at 1p36.12 near WNT4. In addition, we establish an association of rs13394619 in GREB1 at 2p25.1 with endometriosis and identify a newly associated locus at 12q22 near VEZT (rs10859871). Excluding cases of European ancestry of minimal or unknown severity, we identified additional previously unknown loci at 2p14 (rs4141819), 6p22.3 (rs7739264) and 9p21.3 (rs1537377). All seven SNP effects were replicated in an independent cohort and associated at P <5 × 10−8 in a combined analysis. Finally, we found a significant overlap in polygenic risk for endometriosis between the genome-wide association cohorts of European and Japanese descent (P = 8.8 × 10−11), indicating that many weakly associated SNPs represent true endometriosis risk loci and that risk prediction and future targeted disease therapy may be transferred across these populations.

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Figure 1
Figure 2: Annotated plots for loci where imputation helped resolve the associated region.
Figure 3
Figure 4: Allele-specific score prediction for endometriosis, using the BBJ population as the discovery data set and the combined QIMR-HCS and OX population as the target data set.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge with appreciation all the women who participated in the QIMR, OX and BBJ studies. We thank Endometriosis Associations for supporting study recruitment. We also thank the many hospital directors and staff, gynecologists, general practitioners and pathology services in Australia, the UK and the United States who provided assistance with confirmation of diagnoses. We thank Sullivan and Nicolaides Pathology and the Queensland Medical Laboratory Pathology for pro bono collection and delivery of blood samples and other pathology services for assistance with blood collection. The HCS team thanks the men and women of the Hunter region who participated in the study.

We thank B. Haddon, D. Smyth, H. Beeby, O. Zheng, B. Chapman and S. Medland for project and database management, sample processing, genotyping and imputation. We thank Brisbane gynecologist D.T. O'Connor for his important role in initiating the early stages of the project and for confirmation of diagnosis and disease stage from clinical records of many cases, including 251 in these analyses. We are grateful to the many research assistants and interviewers for assistance with the studies contributing to the QIMR collection. The QIMR study was supported by grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia (241944, 339462, 389927, 389875, 389891, 389892, 389938, 443036, 442915, 442981, 496610, 496739, 552485 and 552498), the Cooperative Research Centre for Discovery of Genes for Common Human Diseases (CRC), Cerylid Biosciences (Melbourne) and donations from N. Hawkins and S. Hawkins. D.R.N. was supported by the NHMRC Fellowship (339462 and 613674) and Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (FT0991022) schemes. S.M. was supported by NHMRC Career Development Awards (496674 and 613705). E.G.H. (631096) and G.W.M. (339446 and 619667) were supported by the NHMRC Fellowship scheme. The HCS was funded by the University of Newcastle, the Gladys M Brawn Fellowship scheme and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation in Australia.

We thank L. Cotton, L. Pope, G. Chalk and G. Farmer. We also thank P. Koninckx, M. Sillem, C. O'Herlihy, M. Wingfield, M. Moen, L. Adamyan, E. McVeigh, C. Sutton, D. Adamson and R. Batt for providing diagnostic confirmation. The work presented here was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust (WT084766/Z/08/Z) and makes use of Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium 2 (WTCCC2) control data generated by the WTCCC. A full list of the investigators who contributed to the generation of these data is available at the Wellcome Trust website (see URLs). Funding for the WTCCC project was provided by the Wellcome Trust under awards 076113 and 085475. C.A.A. was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust (098051). A.P.M. was supported by a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. S.H.K. is supported by the Oxford Partnership Comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre, with funding from the Department of Health National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centres funding scheme. K.T.Z. is supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship (WT085235/Z/08/Z).

We thank the members of the Rotary Club of Osaka-Midosuji District 2660 Rotary International in Japan for supporting our study. This work was conducted as part of the BioBank Japan Project that was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of the Japanese government.

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Contributions

Manuscript preparation and final approval: D.R.N., S.-K.L., C.A.A., J.N.P., S.U., A.P.M., S.M., S.D.G., A.K.H., N.G.M., J.A., E.G.H., M.M., R.J.S., S.H.K., S.A.T., S.A.M., S.A., K.T., Y.N., K.T.Z., H.Z. and G.W.M. Study conception and design: D.R.N., S.M., Y.N., K.T.Z., H.Z. and G.W.M. GWAS data collection, sample preparation and clinical phenotyping: J.N.P., S.U., A.K.H., N.G.M., J.A., E.G.H., M.M., R.J.S., S.H.K., S.A.T., K.T.Z., H.Z. and G.W.M. Replication data collection, sample preparation and clinical phenotyping: S.A., K.T. and H.Z. Replication genotyping: H.Z. Data analysis: genome-wide association analysis: D.R.N., C.A.A. and S.-K.L.; imputation and replication analysis: D.R.N. and S.-K.L.; polygenic prediction, gene-based analysis and meta-analysis: D.R.N. Obtaining study funding: D.R.N., S.M., N.G.M., S.H.K., S.A.T., S.A.M., Y.N., K.T.Z. and G.W.M.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Dale R Nyholt, Krina T Zondervan, Hitoshi Zembutsu or Grant W Montgomery.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Nyholt, D., Low, SK., Anderson, C. et al. Genome-wide association meta-analysis identifies new endometriosis risk loci. Nat Genet 44, 1355–1359 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.2445

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