Impact of control selection strategies on GWAS results: a study of prostate cancer in the UK biobank
Jingzhan Lu, Johan H Thygesen, Robin N Beaumont, Michael N Weedon, Harry D Green · 2026
Read Impact of control selection strategies on GWAS results: a study of prostate cancer in the UK biobank by Jingzhan Lu, Johan H Thygesen, Robin N Beaumont, Michael N Weedon, Harry D Green (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13222510.txt.
Description
Jingzhan Lu and four colleagues defend their study design in a reply to critics, in a 2026 letter about gene hunting in the UK Biobank. Their original paper asked how choosing control groups changes genome-wide association results for prostate cancer. Correspondents questioned their use of propensity score matching, a technique born in causal inference.
The authors answer that matching is also a plain sampling and design tool: it balances cases and controls on age, sex, and timing, sharpening comparisons without claiming causation by itself. It can even absorb messy factors like social position or lab batch effects that models handle badly. On genetic principal components, they grant that over-conditioning can bias results in theory, citing index event bias in biobanks. But the components remain standard armor against ancestry confounding. The letter asks readers to judge matching by the question asked and the performance shown.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jingzhan Lu, Johan H Thygesen, Robin N Beaumont, Michael N Weedon, Harry D Green |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 6 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |