Remarkably, the use of eQTLs increased power to detect associations with hypertension (Fig. 8B). In particular, eQTLs in subcutaneous adipose were significantly enriched for multiple associations with hypertension relative to muscle, lung, thyroid, skin, heart, and tibial artery (P < 0.05, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test) (Fig. 8B). This is particularly noteworthy because the WTCCC GWAS of this disease did not yield any genome-wide significant associations, which suggests that larger sample sizes were required to identify highly significant SNP associations in the absence of functional data. Because the majority of GWAS-identified variants (~95%) lie in noncoding regions of the genome, we determined which genome-wide significant trait associations (P < 5 × 10−8) reported to date are in LD with at least one GTEx-identified eQTL. We merged NCBI’s Phenotype-Genotype Integrator (PheGenI) (48) and the NHGRI GWAS catalog (49), yielding 10,129 genome-wide significant SNP associations with nearly 630 distinct complex traits. In total, 5195 “independent” SNPs were identified after LD pruning at r2 ≥ 0.8 and counting SNPs only once (14). Of these, 308 (~6%) are in strong LD(r2 ≥ 0.8), with a “best eQTL
