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LDSC

I applied Linkage Disequlibirum Score Regression1 to the Neale Lab's GWAS of self-reported chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in the UK Biobank.

Since the phenotype used in this study is based on a single-question self-report, it is less precise than the detailed phenotyping used in DecodeME. This imprecision combined with the relatively small number of cases in this GWAS is expected to produce noisy summary statistics. Nevertheless, it is still interesting and worthwhile to analyze these summary statistics.

The LDSC results are shown below:

Parameter Value
h2_liab 0.08019
h2_liab_se 0.02978
Lambda_gc 1.027
Mean_chi2 1.028
Intercept 1.006
Intercept_se 0.006519
Ratio 0.1942
Ratio_se 0.2289

The liability-scale heritability of 8% is similar to that seen in DecodeME.

The low intercept and moderate attenuation ratio suggest low risk of confounding by stratification.


  1. Brendan K Bulik-Sullivan, Po-Ru Loh, Hilary K Finucane, Stephan Ripke, Jian Yang, Nick Patterson, Mark J Daly, Alkes L Price, and Benjamin M Neale. LD Score regression distinguishes confounding from polygenicity in genome-wide association studies. Nature Genetics, 47(3):291–295, 2015. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4495769/