The relevance of SVs to eQTLs suggests that a number of disease associations previously detected by GWAS may be attributable to SVs, which are difficult to assess directly in GWAS. To test this hypothesis we compared 12,892 previously reported SNP-based GWAS hits to SVs identified in our data set, identifying 136 candidate SVs in strong LD (r2 > 0.8) with GWAS variants, which represents a 1.5-fold enrichment when compared to a VAF and haplotype size-matched background set and a threefold enrichment for deletions >20 kbp (P = 0.004) (Fig. 2e and Supplementary Note). Approximately a third of these candidate GWAS associations (39) were novel, impacting phenotypes such as colorectal cancer and bone mineral density (Supplementary Table 10). Interestingly, 64% of these novel associations were mediated by deletions <1 kbp, a size range for which our study has improved power over previous surveys, which more than doubles (from 18 to 40) the number of SVs <1 kbp in strong LD with a GWAS lead SNP. Thus, our SV resource could facilitate discovery of numerous additional disease-linked SVs.
