Six African-American cohorts were used in the present study. Cohorts 1 and 2 were derived from a type 2 diabetic nephropathy GWAS. The community non-diabetic cohort (cohort 1) consisted of 816 subjects who reported no history of diabetes and who were recruited from the community and internal medicine clinics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Cohort 2 consisted of 899 subjects with T2DM and end-stage renal disease (T2DM–ESRD), recruited from dialysis facilities in the southeastern US.33 An additional community non-diabetic cohort (cohort 3), including 621 subjects (616 unrelated subjects and 5 related subjects from two nuclear families) who reported no history of diabetes, was recruited from the community and internal medicine clinics similar to that of cohort 1. A second diabetic cohort (cohort 4) consisting of 891 subjects with T2DM and 617 subjects with T2DM–ESRD (1005 unrelated subjects and 503 related subjects from 178 nuclear families) was recruited from the community, churches, health fairs, medical clinics and dialysis facilities. The Diabetes Heart Studies cohort (cohort 5) consisted of subjects recruited from the community and internal medicine clinics in two
