Multiethnic genome-wide association study identifies ethnic-specific associations with body mass index in Hispanics and African Americans.

Genome-wide association studies of obesity have typically assumed fixed genetic effects across ethnicities, rarely attempting to thoroughly compare and contrast findings across various ethnic groups. Therefore, our study aimed to identify novel genetic associations with body mass index (BMI), a common measure of obesity, and explore their cross-ethnic generalizability in a multiethnic population. To that end, we conducted ​ethnic-specific genome-wide association analyses among 1235 Hispanic, 706 Asian, 1549 African American, and 2395 European American subjects from the Multi-ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). We compared findings ​across ethnicities and investigated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with suggestive BMI-association p-values among 3379 Hispanic and 6871 African American subjects from the Women's Health Initiative (WHI).

1,235 Hispanic individuals, 706 Asian ancestry individuals, 1,549 African American individuals, 2,395 European ancestry individuals