Genomic architecture and prediction of censored time-to-event phenotypes with a Bayesian genome-wide analysis

Here, we develop a Bayesian approach (BayesW) that provides probabilistic inference of the genetic architecture of age-at-diagnosis of disease and time-to-event phenotypes. We show in extensive simulation work that our method provides insight into genetic effects underlying disease progression, achieving higher statistical power and improved genomic prediction as compared to other approaches. We develop a hybrid-parallel sampling scheme facilitating age-at-onset analyses in large-scale biobank data. In the UK Biobank, we find evidence for an infinitesimal contribution of many thousands of common genomic regions to variation in the onset of common complex disorders of high blood pressure (HBP), cardiac disease (CAD), and type-2 diabetes (T2D), and for the genetic basis of age-at-onset reflecting the underlying genetic liability to disease. In contrast, while age-at-menopause and age-at-menarche are highly polygenic, we find higher variance contributed by low frequency variants. We find 360 independent 50kb regions for age-at-menarche with [≥] 95% posterior inclusion probability of contributing 0.001% to the genetic variance, 115 regions for age-at-menopause, 246 regions for age-at-diagnosis of HBP, 32 regions for CAD, and 56 regions for T2D. Genomic prediction into the Estonian Genome Centre data shows that BayesW gives higher prediction accuracy than other approaches.