1. ¹Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, UK
2. ²Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Unit, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, London, UK

Correspondence: Claire M.A. Haworth (Claire.Haworth@iop.kcl.ac.uk)

Received 4 March 2008; Accepted 26 June 2008; Published online 9 October 2008.

Abstract

The growing evidence of health risks associated with the rise in childhood obesity adds to the urgency of understanding the determinants of BMI. Twin analyses on repeated assessments of BMI in a longitudinal sample of >7,000 children indicated that the genetic influence on BMI becomes progressively stronger, with heritability increasing from 0.48 at age 4 to 0.78 at age 11. In the same large twin sample, the association between a common variant in the FTO gene and BMI increased in parallel with the rise in heritability, going from R² < 0.001 at age 4 to R² = 0.01 at age 11. These findings suggest that expression of FTO may become stronger throughout childhood. Increases in heritability may also be due to children increasingly selecting environments correlated with their genetic propensities.