David C. Whiteman

Study questionWhich genetic factors regulate female propensity for giving birth to spontaneous dizygotic (DZ) twins?Summary answerWe identified four new loci, GNRH1, FSHR, ZFPM1, and IPO8, in addition to previously identified loci, FSHB and…

Endometriosis is a common condition associated with debilitating pelvic pain and infertility. A genome-wide association study meta-analysis, including 60,674 cases and 701,926 controls of European and East Asian descent, identified 42 genom…

Open-angle glaucoma (OAG) is a major cause of blindness worldwide. To identify new risk loci for OAG, we performed a genome-wide association study in 3,071 OAG cases and 6,750 unscreened controls, and meta-analysed the results with GWAS dat…

Esophageal adenocarcinoma (EA) is a rapidly fatal cancer with rising incidence in the developed world. Most EAs arise in a metaplastic epithelium, Barrett's esophagus (BE), which is associated with greatly increased risk of EA. One of the k…

ObjectivesTo estimate the proportion and number of cancers occurring in Australia in 2010 attributable to menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) use.MethodsWe estimated the population attributable fraction for cancers causally associated with MHT…

Thirteen common susceptibility loci have been reproducibly associated with cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM). We report the results of an international 2-stage meta-analysis of CMM genome-wide association studies (GWAS). This meta-analysis…

Primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) is a major cause of irreversible blindness worldwide. We performed a genome-wide association study in an Australian discovery cohort comprising 1,155 cases with advanced POAG and 1,992 controls. We investi…

Telomere length has been associated with risk of many cancers, but results are inconsistent. Seven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) previously associated with mean leukocyte telomere length were either genotyped or well-imputed in 111…

BackgroundEsophageal adenocarcinoma (EA) is an increasingly common cancer with poor survival. Barrett's esophagus (BE) is the main precursor to EA, and every year 0.12% to 0.5% of BE patients progress to EA. BE typically arises on a backgro…

We performed a genome-wide association study of melanoma in a discovery cohort of 2,168 Australian individuals with melanoma and 4,387 control individuals. In this discovery phase, we confirm several previously characterized melanoma-associ…

Endometrioid and clear cell subtypes of ovarian cancer are both known to be closely associated with endometriosis and endometrial pathology, and so have often been combined in studies of causation. We have examined these ovarian cancers sep…

In 1998, Risch proposed a hypothesis for the pathogenesis of ovarian cancer relating to the role of androgens in stimulating epithelial cell proliferation. Although this hypothesis has been widely discussed, direct evidence to support it is…