Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS and Biological Insights to Cognition: A response to Hill (2017)

Abstract

Hill (2017) presented a critique of our recently published paper in Cell Reports entitled “Large-Scale Cognitive GWAS Meta-Analysis Reveals Tissue-Specific Neural Expression and Potential Nootropic Drug Targets” (Lam et al. 2017). Specifically, Hill offered several inter-related comments suggesting potential problems with our use of a new analytic method called Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS (MTAG; Turley et al. 2017). In this brief paper, we respond to each of these concerns. Using empirical data, we conclude that our MTAG results do not suffer from “inflation of the false discovery rate”, as suggested by Hill (2017), and are not “more relevant to the genetic contributions to education than they are to the genetic contributions to intelligence.”