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Association between DNA methylation at SOCS3 gene and body mass index might be due to familial confounding

International Journal of Obesity volume 41, pages 995–996 (2017)Cite this article

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Wilson et al.1 found, from cross-sectional analyses of data for middle-aged women from the Sister Study cohort, that DNA methylation in blood at nine CpG sites was associated with body mass index (BMI). We attempted to replicate their findings by using the Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip array to measure DNA methylation in blood for 478 middle-aged women of similar age (mean=56.4 years, s.d.=7.9 years) and BMI (mean=26.8 kg m−2, s.d.=5.7 kg m−2) from 130 sibships from the Australian Mammographic Density Twins and Sisters Study. Details of measurement and data pre-processing, including minimising batch effects using the ComBat method,2 can be found in Li et al.3

We first used a linear mixed-effects model to estimate the cross-sectional association between the methylation level at each CpG site (measured as beta-value) and BMI, adjusting for age and estimated proportions of white blood cells4 as fixed effects, and for sibship as a random effect. For CpG sites marked by probes cg14870271, cg27637521, cg17501210, cg06500161, cg07728579 and cg13134297, the results were of similar magnitude to those reported by Wilson et al.;1 for the other three sites, the 95% confidence intervals (CIs) did not include the estimates reported by Wilson et al.1 (Table 1).

Table 1 Association results for the nine CpG sites and BMI in the Australian Mammographic Density Twins and Sisters Studya
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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    S Li & J L Hopper

  2. Department of Pathology, Genetic Epidemiology Laboratory, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    E M Wong & M C Southey

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  1. S Li
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  2. E M Wong
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  3. M C Southey
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  4. J L Hopper
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Correspondence to J L Hopper.

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Li, S., Wong, E., Southey, M. et al. Association between DNA methylation at SOCS3 gene and body mass index might be due to familial confounding. Int J Obes 41, 995–996 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2017.56

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