To investigate disease relevance, we used the NHGRI GWAS catalog (17 July 2013),1 identifying the nearest gene (“GWAS-genes”) for each of 3,628 significantly disease-associated SNPs (P ≤ 5×10−8), for a total of 2,343 GWAS genes. Heritability was highly significantly positively associated with GWAS genes (Figure 2b and Table 2). Enrichment remained elevated for genes nearby, but not necessarily closest, to the GWAS SNP, and genes with numerous nearby GWAS SNPs were especially heritable (Supplementary Figure 2). Enrichment was attenuated by removing chr6 genes (including the MHC region) and for immune-related diseases43 (Supplementary Table 4). GWAS phenotypes include those relevant to blood/immunity along with central nervous system, bowel, cancers, and morphological traits. Given the GWAS-gene designation based only on proximity to NHGRI SNPs, these results may reflect an even stronger true tendency of disease-causing genes to be highly heritable (see Supplementary Figure 2). These results are complementary to observations that disease-associated SNPs show eQTL enrichment.6 Additionally, OMIM shows similar heritability enrichment, even though NHGRI GWAS and OMIM only partly overlapped (of genes in either list, 10% are in both). The OMIM
