Table 1.
Large-scale meta-analysis in body fat distribution
| Phenotype | Sex | Sample sizes |
Associated loci
P < 5 × 10 −9 |
Dimorphic index SNPs
(% of total) |
(se)
|
Variance explained | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UKBB | GIANT | Meta | Loci | Independent signals | |||||
| Combined | 484 563 | 210 086 | 694 649 | 346 | 463 | 53 (15.3) | 0.174 (0.002) | 3.9% | |
| WHRadjBMI | Women | 262 759 | 116 742 | 379 501 | 266 | 363 | 77 (28.9) | 0.256 (0.003) | 3.6% |
| Men | 221 804 | 93 480 | 315 284 | 91 | 102 | 13 (14.3) | 0.167 (0.003) | 1.0% | |
| Combined | 485 486 | 212 248 | 697 734 | 316 | 382 | 37 (11.7) | 0.194 (0.002) | 3.0% | |
| WHR | Women | 263 148 | 118 004 | 381 152 | 203 | 261 | 64 (31.5) | 0.254 (0.003) | 4.0% |
| Men | 222 338 | 94 434 | 316 772 | 79 | 82 | 10 (12.7) | 0.208 (0.003) | 0.3% | |
We performed a meta-analysis of fat distribution as measured by WHRadjBMI in up to 694 649 individuals. We performed analyses of WHR as a sensitivity measure. Our analyses increase the number of WHRadjBMI-associated loci (P < 5 × 10−9, to account for SNP density in UK Biobank) to 346 loci. SNP-based heritability (
) results, estimated using the REML method implemented (10), and top-associated loci indicate patterns of sex dimorphism. The top-associated index SNPs explain 3.9% of the overall phenotypic variance (i.e. adjusted R2) in fat distribution (calculated in an independent dataset, N = 7721).