Our study has a number of strengths. First, we have power to detect associations of small magnitude, with data on 20,288 individuals from 14 European studies with more than 2.5 million genotyped and imputed SNPs. Second, we aimed to minimise Type 1 error whilst taking appropriate account of the correlation between neighbouring SNPs. Finally, the literature search was designed to be comprehensive to include all reported genetic variants with effect on lung function irrespective of disease status or ethnicity. To our knowledge, this is the first study to comprehensively evaluate the role of previously associated genes in a large genome-wide association study.
