We used LDSC to estimate rg between major depression and a range of other disorders, diseases, and human traits22. The intent of these comparisons was to evaluate the extent of shared common variant genetic architectures in order to suggest hypotheses about the fundamental genetic basis of major depression (given its extensive comorbidity with psychiatric and medical conditions and its association with anthropometric and other risk factors). Subject overlap of itself does not bias rg. These rg are mostly based on studies of independent subjects and the estimates should be unbiased by confounding of genetic and non-genetic effects (except if there is genotype by environment correlation). When GWA studies include overlapping samples, rg remains unbiased but the intercept of the LDSC regression is an estimate of the correlation between association statistics attributable to sample overlap. These calculations were done using the internal PGC GWA library and with LD-Hub (URLs)60.
