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Recapitulation of genome-wide association studies on body mass index in the Korean population

International Journal of Obesity volume 36, pages 1127–1130 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Obesity is a risk factor for multiple disorders such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Recently, a genome-wide association study for body mass index (BMI) was conducted in 249 796 individuals of European ancestry by the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits (GIANT) consortium. They identified 14 known obesity susceptibility loci and 18 new loci associated with BMI at the genome-wide significance level (P<5 × 10−8). Because the prevalence and severity of obesity vary among ethnic groups, it is worthy to investigate these results in another ethnic population. We examined the BMI association of 19 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) out of the 32 in 8842 individuals from the Korean Association Resource data, and found 12 SNPs to be associated with BMI in the Korean population. Eight loci, rs10968576 (BDNF), rs3817334 (MTCH2), rs1558902 (FTO), rs571312 (MC4R), rs543874 (SEC16B), rs987237 (TFAP2B), rs2867125 (TMEM18) and rs7138803 (FAIM2), were previously known obesity susceptibility loci, and the remaining four loci, rs1514175 (TNNI3K), rs206936 (NUDT3), rs4771122 (MTIF3) and rs2241423 (MAP2K5), were newly identified as BMI loci by the GIANT study. Further, all 12 SNPs showed the same direction of effect on BMI between the two ethnic groups, suggesting a similar genetic architecture governing the obesity.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the Kyung Hee University in 2011 (KHU-20110051). We thank the Korean National Institute of Health, which contributed to the collection and phenotypic characterization of the clinical samples and the genotyping and analysis of the GWA data.

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  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea

    K W Hong & B Oh

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  1. K W Hong
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Correspondence to B Oh.

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Hong, K., Oh, B. Recapitulation of genome-wide association studies on body mass index in the Korean population. Int J Obes 36, 1127–1130 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2011.202

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