“…The Y chromosome plays an important biological role in imparting male characteristics, including sex determination (Sinclair et al, 1990), spermatogenesis (Reijo et al, 1995;Nakahori et al, 1996), and male-specific diseases such as prostate cancer (Stone et al, 1978;Ohnuki et al, 1980;Atkin & Baker, 1985). In addition, there have been reports indicating that there exist associations between Y chromosome haplogroups and male infertility (Kuroki et al, 1999;Krausz et al, 2001;Lu et al, 2007;Yang et al, 2008;Puzuka et al, 2011;Ran et al, 2013;Sato et al, 2013), semen parameters (Sato et al, 2014), and prostate cancer (Ewis et al, 2006;Lindstr⏠om et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2012) in some populations, including the Japanese. The Y chromosome haplogroup is also associated with several phenotypes other than male characteristics, including cardiovascular risk (Hiura et al, 2008;Bloomer et al, 2013;Kostrzewa et al, 2013), coronary artery disease (Charchar et al, 2012), lipids (Charchar et al, 2004;Russo et al, 2008), and blood pressure (Charchar et al, 2002).…”