We performed genome-wide genotypic association analyses for smoking status (adjusted for age and sex) and identified a cluster of nine SNPs, upstream (i.e., around 93 kb) from the IL15 gene, which ranked among the most significant 30 SNPs tested genome-wide in the total sample (Appendix I). Of particular interest, three of the nine SNPs, rs4956302, rs17354547 and rs1402812, ranked as the most significant SNPs among all SNPs tested genome-wide (Appendix I). We therefore focused our subsequent analyses on these nine SNPs.
