All participants provided informed consent on a document that had been approved by all participating Institutional Review Boards. The relevant information has been described in a previous paper (Cho et al. 2009). Briefly, samples from the 10,038 participants in the Korea Association Resource (KARE) project were recruited from two areas, Ansung and Ansan, in South Korea. Participant ages ranged from 40 to 69 years. Two population based cohorts in this study were established as part of Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study (KoGES), which started in 2001, that provides extensive phenotype data over 260 traits through epidemiological surveys, physical examination and clinical examination.
