Article
Author: Honerlaw, Jacqueline ; Gelernter, Joel ; Kim, Youngdae ; Muralidhar, Sumitra ; Liao, Katherine P. ; Shakt, Gabrielle ; Overstreet, Cassie ; Sun, Yan V. ; Gaziano, J. Michael ; Clifford, Royce ; Davies, Laura ; Tourassi, Georgia ; Whitbourne, Stacey ; Duvall, Scott ; Roussos, Panos ; Cai, Tianxi ; Huffman, Jennifer E. ; Kember, Rachel ; Grant, Struan F. A. ; Casas, Juan P. ; Voight, Benjamin F. ; Tsao, Noah ; Pyarajan, Saiju ; Cho, Kelly ; Ho, Yuk-Lam ; Begoli, Edmon ; Madduri, Ravi K. ; Cohen, Jeremy ; Damrauer, Scott ; Brunette, Charles A. ; Luoh, Shiuh-Wen ; Merritt, Victoria C. ; Garcon, Helene ; Kranzler, Henry ; Justice, Amy ; Nandi, Tarak Nath ; Liu, Molei ; Shi, Yunling ; Dochtermann, Daniel R. ; Joseph, Jacob ; Tipton, Ryan ; Kripke, Colleen M. ; Bick, Alexander G. ; Tsao, Philip ; Carroll, Robert J. ; Iyengar, Sudha K. ; Venkatesh, Sanan ; Rodriguez, Alex ; O'Donnell, Christopher J. ; Levey, Daniel ; Deak, Joseph D. ; Conery, Mitchell ; Heise, David A. ; Panickan, Vidul Ayakulangara ; Wang, Xuan ; Hung, Adriana ; Ramoni, Rachel ; Devineni, Poornima ; Assimes, Themistocles L. ; Murray, Michael ; Guare, Lindsay ; Sangar, Rahul ; Goethert, Ian ; Linares, Franciel ; Costa, Lauren ; Posner, Daniel C. ; Zhou, Wei ; Verma, Anurag ; Polimanti, Renato ; Moser, Jennifer ; Voloudakis, Georgios
One of the justifiable criticisms of human genetic studies is the underrepresentation of participants from diverse populations. Lack of inclusion must be addressed at-scale to identify causal disease factors and understand the genetic causes of health disparities. We present genome-wide associations for 2068 traits from 635,969 participants in the Department of Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program, a longitudinal study of diverse United States Veterans. Systematic analysis revealed 13,672 genomic risk loci; 1608 were only significant after including non-European populations. Fine-mapping identified causal variants at 6318 signals across 613 traits. One-third (
n
= 2069) were identified in participants from non-European populations. This reveals a broadly similar genetic architecture across populations, highlights genetic insights gained from underrepresented groups, and presents an extensive atlas of genetic associations.