Genetic sharing with coronary artery disease identifies potential novel loci for bone mineral density

Abstract Bone mineral density (BMD) is a complex trait with high missing heritability. Numerous evidences have shown that BMD variation has a relationship with coronary artery disease (CAD). This relationship may come from a common genetic basis called pleiotropy. By leveraging the pleiotropy with CAD, we may be able to improve the detection power of genetic variants associated with BMD. Using a recently developed conditional false discovery rate (cFDR) method, we jointly analyzed summary statistics from two large independent genome wide association studies (GWAS) of lumbar spine (LS) BMD and CAD. Strong pleiotropic enrichment and 7 pleiotropic SNPs were found for the two traits. We identified 41 SNPs for LS BMD (cFDR