The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study (ARIC data) was used as an independent LD reference when estimating SBLUP SNP effects of Eq. (11). Eight thousand seven hundred and forty-four European individuals were selected and the data were imputed and QC conducted in the same way as described above for the GERA cohort. We then reduced the SNPs used in both the GERA and ARIC cohorts to overlapping HapMap3 SNPs, which gave 557,034 SNPs that were used in the simulation study.