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Note on Phenotype

I analyzed the Million Veterans Program1 GWAS of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Note that Million Veterans GWAS are based on PheCodes, which aggregate billing codes. As observed on the Science for ME forum, this Million Veterans GWAS uses PheCode 798.1, which aggregates Chronic fatigue syndrome, Post-viral fatigue syndrome, and Chronic fatigue unspecified. Both the aggregation of multiple distinct billing codes (i.e. aggregation of unspecified fatigue with chronic fatigue syndrome) and imprecise use of these billing codes could add considerable noise to this GWAS.

  1. Anurag Verma, Jennifer E Huffman, Alex Rodriguez, Mitchell Conery, Molei Liu, Yuk-Lam Ho, Youngdae Kim, David A Heise, Lindsay Guare, Vidul Ayakulangara Panickan, and others. Diversity and scale: Genetic architecture of 2068 traits in the VA Million Veteran Program. Science, 385(6706):eadj1182, 2024. URL: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj1182. ↩