LDSC
Linkage Disequilibrium Score Regression1 was applied to the UK BioBank GWAS of migraine23. The aim was to estimate heritability and look for signs of stratification and confounding.
The results are below:
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| h2_liab | 0.09394 |
| h2_liab_se | 0.007208 |
| Lambda_gc | 1.166 |
| Mean_chi2 | 1.212 |
| Intercept | 1.045 |
| Intercept_se | 0.00857 |
| Ratio | 0.2108 |
| Ratio_se | 0.04042 |
The heritability of 0.09394 in this UK BioBank study is comparable to the heritability calculated from a migraine GWAS of a different cohort from Verma et al.4, where the heritability was 0.1005.
The attenuation ratio of 0.2108 in this study indicates less potential confounding from population stratification than that calculated from the Verma et al. study4, where the ratio was 0.3561.
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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/. ↩
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UK Biobank Whole-Genome Sequencing Consortium and others. Whole-genome sequencing of 490,640 UK Biobank participants. Nature, 645(8081):692, 2025. URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09272-9. ↩
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GWAS Catalog - Study: GCST90473326. [Accessed 25-05-2026]. URL: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/studies/GCST90473326. ↩
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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. ↩↩