Bayesian analysis of longitudinal traits in the Korea Association Resource (KARE) cohort

Various methodologies for the genetic analysis of longitudinal data have been proposed and applied to data from large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with traits of interest and to detect SNP-time interactions. We recently proposed a grid-based Bayesian mixed model for longitudinal genetic data and showed that our Bayesian method increased the statistical power compared to the corresponding univariate method and well detected SNP-time interactions. In this paper, we further analyze longitudinal obesity-related traits such as body mass index, hip circumference, waist circumference, and waist-hip ratio from Korea Association Resource data to evaluate the proposed Bayesian method. We first conducted GWAS analyses of cross-sectional traits and combined the results of GWAS analyses through a meta-analysis based on a trajectory model and a random-effects model. We then applied our Bayesian method to a subset of SNPs selected by meta-analysis to further discover SNPs associated with traits of interest and SNP-time interactions. The proposed Bayesian method identified several novel SNPs associated with longitudinal obesity-related traits, and almost 25% of the identified SNPs had significant p-values for SNP-time interactions.