Genetic risk sum score comprised of common polygenic variation is associated with body mass index.

ABSTRACT: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of body mass index (BMI) using large samples have yielded approximately a dozen robustly associated variants and implicated additional loci. Individually these variants have small effects and in aggregate explain a small proportion of the variance. As a result, replication attempts have limited power to achieve genome-wide significance, even with several thousand subjects. Since there is strong prior evidence for genetic influence on BMI for specific variants, alternative approaches to replication can be applied. Instead of testing individual loci sequentially, a genetic risk sum score (GRSS) summarizing the total number of risk alleles can be tested. In the current study, GRSS comprising 56 top variants catalogued from two large meta-analyses was tes

SUBMITTER: Peterson RE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3403709 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature