This method is an advance for several reasons: it does not require individual genotypes, genome-wide significant SNPs or LD-pruning (which loses information if causal SNPs are in LD). Our method is not biased by sample overlap and is computationally fast. Furthermore, our approach does not require measuring multiple traits on the same individuals, so it scales easily to studies of thousands of pairs of traits. These advantages allow us to estimate genetic correlation for many more pairs of phenotypes than was possible with existing methods.
