Laboratory values
The data added from the Kanta register include all basic laboratory tests used in medical care as well as a number of less common laboratory results. Laboratory data are available for more than 400 000 FinnGen participants. The first Kanta laboratory results are from 2014, with comprehensive results available from 2018 onwards.
FinnGen’s experts carried out extensive quality control of the laboratory values before introducing the new data into FinnGen. In addition, the data have been harmonised and adapted to international standards to facilitate the straightforward use of the data in research. Combining the Kanta data with the existing genetic and health data will open up new opportunities for studying disease progression, which is one of the main research objectives of FinnGen.
For example, standard clinical metrics of kidney function, liver enzymes, lung function and hematologic metrics taken at all relevant clinical visits will provide new markers for age and disease-related declines that will serve as indicators for progression and response to therapies and will be further employed in combination with register data in the definition of complex progression endpoints. The primary aim regarding the laboratory values is that FinnGen will perform a comprehensive set of GWAS analysis of the laboratory values and their age related changes and co-localise the identified loci with those identified in the FinnGen endpoint.
Researchers can access the number of laboratory measurements and the average laboratory results per disease using Risteys. The Risteys website is a comprehensive and open application hosted by FinnGen that allows you to view non-individual-level summary results for health variables in the FinnGen data. For example, it provides information on the prevalence of different diseases in Finland by age group and the different medicines used to treat the diseases, according to the level of use. Now Risteys also provides case-by-case laboratory measurements for different diseases, which can be classified by prevalence, incidence or outcome.
In October 2025, we released the first set of laboratory value GWAS results. You can browse the results here. Analyses cover 383 lab measurements (OMOPIDs) with data from ≥1,000 participants each. GWAS phenotypes are the median of lab values for an individual (quantitative labs) or ever positive (binary labs). Please see our Access results page for more information.