Genome-wide association meta-analysis identifies new endometriosis risk loci
Nyholt DR., Low SK., Anderson CA., Painter JN., Uno S., Morris AP., MacGregor S., Gordon SD., Henders AK., Martin NG., Attia J., Holliday EG., McEvoy M., Scott RJ., Kennedy SH., Treloar SA., Missmer SA., Adachi S., Tanaka K., Nakamura Y., Zondervan KT., Zembutsu H., Montgomery GW.
We conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 4,604 endometriosis cases and 9,393 controls of Japanese and European 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. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.