Whereas the bottleneck
in earlier studies has been the genotyping technology and price, it
has now become the accessibility of samples. Although the use of
the huge biobanks has been highly successful in a large number of
epidemiologic studies [1e3], genetic epidemiology has not
exploited such study designs to the same extent because the largest
health care biobanks contain sample types considered suboptimal
for genotyping purposes. However, one of the main advantages in
using long term stored (LTS) biological tissue repositories is the
elimination of two expensive and time-consuming steps: the
collection and the classification.