We then extended these results to asthma, the phenotype of primary interest. When we considered the GABRIEL meta-analysis data, we found significant evidence supporting a role for the same 117 genes in asthma susceptibility, likely mediated by their influence on the numbers of circulating immune cells. We were also able to replicate these observations using results from the EVE consortium meta-analysis of asthma GWAS, which firmly supports the set of 117 loci as promising asthma candidate genes.
