Irrespective of such factors, our study only had 80% power to detect ORs of 1.16, 1.09, 1.16 and 1.22 for asthma and hay fever, atopic dermatitis, IgE level and self-reported allergy, respectively (Additional file 4: Table S4), due to the very low proportion of variability in the atopy-related traits explained by the SNPs used. This evidence concerns the gene IGHE and asthma.