Wiley, Arthritis and Rheumatology, 1(66), p. 24-30, 2013
DOI: 10.1002/art.38196
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Objective: The number of confirmed rheumatoid arthritis (RA) loci currently stands at 32, but many lines of evidence indicate that expansion of existing genome wide association studies (GWAS) enhances the power to detect additional loci. The objective of this study was to extend our previous UK RA GWAS adding more independent cases and control samples, with the aim of detecting novel association signals for susceptibility to RA in a homogeneous UK cohort. Methods: We had available 3,223 UK RA cases and 5,272 UK controls, which adds 1,361 cases and 2,334 controls to the original GWAS. The genotype data for all cases was imputed using IMPUTE2. After a stringent QC was applied, 3,034 cases, 5,271 controls and 1,831,729 SNPs were available for analysis. Association testing was performed using PLINK. Results: We found suggestive association to 6 novel RA loci (P