To mitigate false positive rates, genome-wide associations in the screening stage need to be corrected for multiple testing. Apparently, Bonferroni correction (α=5×10-8) is overly conservative because it treats all of the one million markers in the genome as independent (which is impossible). Alternatively, a WTCCC-defined α (=5×10-7) might be more appropriate to the present study[The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium 2007]. As a complementary approach, we also corrected the findings in screening stage by genome-wide false discovery rate (FDR)[Benjamini and Hochberg 1995], replicated the findings, and confirmed them by functional studies. Only when a region containing at least one association in meta-analysis that survived WTCCC-defined genome-wide correction (p<5×10-7) together with FDR<0.05, and was replicable across EAs, AAs, and meta-analysis and confirmed by functional studies, should it be taken as a “significant” region, which was conservative enough for statistical significance. In the testing step, (1) two independent samples were used to replicate each other, which significantly reduced the chance of false positive findings (i.e., false discovery rate). (2) We aimed to detect replicable regions, not individual markers. Thus, more than one
