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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2013 Nov 1.
Published in final edited form as: Dev Psychopathol. 2012 Nov;24(4):1195–1214. doi: 10.1017/S0954579412000648

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Sample sizes and number of SNPs required to explain significant proportions of variance in anthropometric traits. These data are based on visual inspection of graphs provided in (Allen, et al., 2010) and (Speliotes, et al., 2010); see the original sources for full details. Note the wide difference in trend for height (estimates based on sample of ~185,000 subjects) and for BMI (estimates based on sample of ~235,000 subjects). Height is much more promising, in that it will take ~500,000 samples to obtain enough genome-wide significant SNPs to account for 15% of the variance in height. For BMI, on the other hand, it is projected that ~700,000 samples are required to account for only 5% of the variance in height. Cause of the discrepancy in genetic architecture of these traits is unknown. These values differ slightly from what is described in the text because extrapolating beyond currently available sample sizes required sample splitting and replication procedures in the original studies in order to unbiasedly estimate effect sizes.