A systematic SNP selection approach to identify mechanisms underlying disease aetiology: linking height to post-menopausal breast and colorectal cancer risk.

ABSTRACT: Data from GWAS suggest that SNPs associated with complex diseases or traits tend to co-segregate in regions of low recombination, harbouring functionally linked gene clusters. This phenomenon allows for selecting a limited number of SNPs from GWAS repositories for large-scale studies investigating shared mechanisms between diseases. For example, we were interested in shared mechanisms between adult-attained height and post-menopausal breast cancer (BC) and colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, because height is a risk factor for these cancers, though likely not a causal factor. Using SNPs from public GWAS repositories at p-values < 1 × 10^-5 and a genomic sliding window of 1 mega base pair, we identified SNP clusters including at least one SNP associated with height and one SNP associate

SUBMITTER: Elands RJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5259777 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature