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

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.