About the Authors

Jacqueline M. Major

Contributed equally to this work with: Jacqueline M. Major, Christine Kiruthu

jacqueline.major@nih.gov

Affiliation Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America

Christine Kiruthu

Contributed equally to this work with: Jacqueline M. Major, Christine Kiruthu

Affiliation Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America

Stephanie J. Weinstein

Affiliation Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America

Ronald L. Horst

Affiliation Heartland Assays, Inc., Ames, Iowa, United States of America

Kirk Snyder

Affiliation Information Management Services, Inc., Silver Spring, Maryland, United States of America

Jarmo Virtamo

Affiliation Department of Chronic Disease Prevention, National Institute for Health and Welfare, Helsinki, Finland

Demetrius Albanes

Affiliation Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America

Competing Interests

Dr. Ronald Horst is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Heartland Assays, Inc., where the 25(OH)D concentrations were measured. Kirk Snyder is an analytic programmer employed by Informations Management Systems, Inc. There are no patents, products in development, or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials..

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: DA JMM SJW JV. Analyzed the data: JMM CK. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: SJW KS RLH JV. Wrote the paper: JMM DA CK. Read and approved the final manuscript: JMM CK SJW RLH KS JV DA.