title: Leveraging Epidemiologic and Clinical Collections for Genomic Studies of Complex Traits.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Present-day limited resources demand DNA and phenotyping alternatives to the traditional prospective population-based epidemiologic collections.
  
  
  METHODS
  To accelerate genomic discovery with an emphasis on diverse populations, we--as part of the Epidemiologic Architecture for Genes Linked to Environment (EAGLE) study--accessed all non-European American samples (n = 15,863) available in BioVU, the Vanderbilt University biorepository linked to de-identified electronic medical records, for genomic studies as part of the larger Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) I study. Given previous studies have cautioned against the secondary use of clinically collected data compared with epidemiologically collected data, we present here a characterization of EAGLE BioVU, including the billing and diagnostic (ICD-9) code distributions for adult and pediatric patients as well as comparisons made for select health metrics (body mass index, glucose, HbA1c, HDL-C, LDL-C, and triglycerides) with the population-based National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) linked to DNA samples (NHANES III, n = 7,159; NHANES 1999-2002, n = 7,839).
  
  
  RESULTS
  Overall, the distributions of billing and diagnostic codes suggest this clinical sample is a mixture of healthy and sick patients like that expected for a contemporary American population.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Little bias is observed among health metrics, suggesting this clinical collection is suitable for genomic studies along with traditional epidemiologic cohorts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Institute for Computational Biology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
authors.forename: Dana C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Crawford
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Goodloe
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Farber-Eger
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Boston
authors.forename: Sarah A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Pendergrass
authors.forename: Jonathan L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Haines
authors.forename: Marylyn D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Ritchie
authors.forename: William S
authors.initials: WS
authors.lastname: Bush
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001741:Black or African American / Q000235:genetics; D002648:Child; D003710:Demography; D005260:Female; D059647:Gene-Environment Interaction; D023281:Genomics; D006630:Hispanic or Latino / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009749:Nutrition Surveys; D019655:Quantitative Trait, Heritable