We assessed the overlap between our results and known asthma susceptibility loci. We downloaded information on genome-wide significant (P < 5×10−8) associations with asthma and asthma-related traits including asthma and hay fever, asthma (childhood onset), asthma (corticosteroid response), bronchodilator response in asthma, pulmonary function decline, and severe asthma in the NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog42. Additionally, we examined top associated variants (which were not genome-wide significant) in the susceptibility to the asthma-COPD overlap syndrome67. In all, we assessed the association statistics of 49 unique asthma-associated trait loci across 26 genomic regions in our Stage 1 meta-analysis results. We also examined the asthma association statistics of our top COPD loci from overall meta-analysis using publically available asthma GWAS data from the GABRIEL Consortium43. For COPD loci not present in the GABRIEL Consortium asthma GWAS data, we attempted to examine proxy SNPs in LD (r2 > 0.5, 1000 genomes phase 1 CEU) with our top COPD loci.
