Our results indicate that many causal variants underlying GWAS results are common and shared between Europeans and East Asians, extending the observation of reports that focused in single traits [17], [19]. This would seem to contradict results by us and others that highlighted heterogeneity in the genetic etiology of disease across human populations [14], [21], [22]. This observation contrasts with the large replicability and large correlation in OR that we observe, as well as with the suggested role of differences in LD in explaining associations non-replicated in East Asians. The apparent contradiction between the present and previous papers can be explained by two facts. First, our previous results focused on candidate-gene studies, which have been largely dominated by false positives [14]; and, second, studies that considered GWAS data addressed different questions, used different approaches and gathered different sets of traits [21] and/or associations [22].
