To evaluate whether these variants showed disease-relevant associations in a non-European population, we studied 71 variants for which data were available in 7,116 COPD cases (20,919 controls) and 5,292 exacerbation cases (1,824 controls) from the China Kadoorie Biobank cohort (CKB) (Supplementary Tables 10 to 13). The allelic risk score was associated with COPD susceptibility (OR per standard deviation change in risk score (95% CI) = 1.08 (1.04-1.11), P=4.2x10-6) suggesting some shared genetic contributions to COPD in European and East Asian descent populations. Thirty-nine of the variants showed a consistent direction of effect on COPD in European and Chinese samples and seven of these were significant (P<0.05). Two signals were significant after correction for multiple testing (Supplementary Table 10c).
