Vukadinovic M, Renjith G, Yuan V, Kwan A, Cheng SC, Li D, Clarke SL, Ouyang D. Impact of Measurement Imprecision on Genetic Association Studies of Cardiac Function.
medRxiv 2023:2023.02.16.23286058. [PMID:
36824841 PMCID:
PMC9949184 DOI:
10.1101/2023.02.16.23286058]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/20/2023]
Abstract
Background
Recent studies have leveraged quantitative traits from imaging to amplify the power of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to gain further insights into the biology of diseases and traits. However, measurement imprecision is intrinsic to phenotyping and can impact downstream genetic analyses.
Methods
Left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), an important but imprecise quantitative imaging measurement, was examined to assess the impact of precision of phenotype measurement on genetic studies. Multiple approaches to obtain LVEF, as well as simulated measurement noise, were evaluated with their impact on downstream genetic analyses.
Results
Even within the same population, small changes in the measurement of LVEF drastically impacted downstream genetic analyses. Introducing measurement noise as little as 7.9% can eliminate all significant genetic associations in an GWAS with almost forty thousand individuals. An increase of 1% in mean absolute error (MAE) in LVEF had an equivalent impact on GWAS power as a decrease of 10% in the cohort sample size, suggesting optimizing phenotyping precision is a cost-effective way to improve power of genetic studies.
Conclusions
Improving the precision of phenotyping is important for maximizing the yield of genome-wide association studies.
Collapse