Meta-analysis finds 3290 height variants and 941 BMI variants in 700000 Europeans
Researchers from the University of Queensland and the GIANT Consortium combined UK Biobank data with prior genome-wide association studies to analyze height and body mass index in approximately 700000 individuals of European ancestry. The meta-analysis, published in Human Molecular Genetics in 2018, identified 3290 near-independent SNPs associated with height and 941 associated with BMI. These variants explain 24.6 percent of the variance of height and 6.0 percent of the variance of BMI. Of the height-associated SNPs, 1185 were located within loci not previously identified, along with 751 new BMI-associated SNPs. The study also integrated expression quantitative trait loci data through summary-data-based Mendelian randomization, prioritizing 610 genes for height and 138 genes for BMI.
The findings increase polygenic prediction accuracy for height and BMI and provide targets for studying complex trait biology. Correlations between polygenic scores and actual measurements in Health and Retirement Study participants were 0.44 for height and 0.22 for BMI.
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