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

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.”

Hill（2017年）对我们最近在《Cell Reports》上发表的论文《大规模认知基因关联研究荟萃分析揭示组织特异性神经表达和潜在的益智药物靶点》（Lam等人，2017年）进行了批判性评价。具体而言，Hill提出了若干相互关联的评论，指出我们使用一种名为多性状基因关联研究分析（MTAG；Turley等人，2017年）的新分析方法的潜在问题。在本简短论文中，我们对这些关切一一作出回应。通过实证数据，我们得出结论，我们的MTAG结果并未遭受Hill（2017年）所提出的“假发现率膨胀”问题，且其与遗传对教育贡献的相关性并不亚于其对智力贡献的相关性。