We carried out a meta-analysis of GWA data for height that included 15,821 individuals from six studies: two type 2 diabetes case-control datasets (DGI4, n = 2,978; FUSION13, n = 2,371), two nested cancer case-control datasets (NHS14, n = 2,286; PLCO15, n = 2,244) and two datasets from population-based cohorts (KORA16, n = 1,644; SardiNIA17, n = 4,305)(Supplementary Table 1 online). All participants were of European ancestry. Because genome-wide genotyping in these studies was done on different platforms (Affymetrix 500K for DGI, KORA, and SardiNIA, Illumina 317K for FUSION and Illumina 550K for NHS and PLCO), we imputed genotypes for all polymorphic markers in the HapMap Phase II CEU reference panel in each GWA scan using the program MACH (Y. Li and G.R.A., unpublished data), thereby generating compatible datasets of 2,260,683 autosomal SNPs. Adult height was tested for association with these SNPs in each study under an additive genetic model, and association results were combined by meta-analysis using a weighted Z-score method (Methods). Whereas the distribution of test statistics for each individual GWA study was consistent with the expectation under
