In European-descent populations, 118 GWAS-identified SNPs have been reported for ECG traits in the NHGRI GWAS catalog as of October 2011. We examined the reported European-descent SNP-trait association to determine if the association “generalized” to African Americans. We considered an association generalized if the observed association was significant at a liberal significance threshold (p<0.05) and had a direction of effect consistent with the original study. Of the 118 SNPs identified in the NHGRI GWAS catalog, 92 were also directly genotyped in our study population: 26, 14, 19, and 33 SNPs were previously associated with heart rate, PR interval, QRS duration, and QT interval, respectively.
