Reply to Suderman et al.: Importance of accounting for blood cell composition in epigenetic studies

Abstract

In our paper (1), we primarily questioned whether the statistical approach used by Borghol et al. (2) was justified, because treating neighboring probes as independent can lead to inflated P value significance. We are glad to see that in their Letter, Borghol et al. do not dispute this (3). We are also pleased that Borghol et al. concur with our concerns regarding their description of procedures for determining the false-discovery rate (FDR) (1, 3). A thorough description of the FDR approach is of great importance in studies that measure many …