Assessing digital phenotyping to enhance genetic studies of human diseases

Population-scale biobanks that combine genetic data and high-dimensional phenotyping for a large number of participants provide an exciting opportunity to perform genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify genetic variants associated with diverse quantitative traits and diseases. A major challenge for GWAS in population biobanks is ascertaining disease cases from heterogeneous data sources such as hospital records, digital questionnaire responses, or interviews. In this study, we use genetic parameters including genetic correlation to evaluate whether GWAS performed using cases in the UK Biobank ascertained from hospital records, questionnaire responses, and family history of diseases implicate similar disease genetics across a range of effect sizes. We find that hospital record and questionnaire GWAS largely identify similar genetic effects for many complex phenotypes and that combining together both phenotyping methods improves power to detect genetic associations. We also show that family GWAS using cases ascertained on family history of disease agrees with combined hospital record/questionnaire GWAS and that family history GWAS has better power to detect genetic associations for some phenotypes. Overall, this work demonstrates that digital phenotyping and unstructured phenotype data can be combined with structured data such as hospital records to identify cases for GWAS in biobanks and improve the ability of such studies to identify genetic associations.