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Updated: May 12, 2026

Assessment of Child Anthropometry in a Large Epidemiologic Study
Published on: February 2, 2017
Genetic variations in the serotoninergic system contribute to body-mass index in Chinese adolescents
Chunhui Chen1, Wen Chen, Chuansheng Chen
1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Objective:
Obesity has become a worldwide health problem in the past decades. Human and animal studies have implicated serotonin in appetite regulation, and behavior genetic studies have shown that body mass index (BMI) has a strong genetic component. However, the roles of genes related to the serotoninergic (5-hydroxytryptamine,5-HT) system in obesity/BMI are not well understood, especially in Chinese subjects.
Subjects And Design:
With a sample of 478 healthy Chinese volunteers, this study investigated the relation between BMI and genetic variations of the serotoninergic system as characterized by 136 representative polymorphisms. We used a system-level approach to identify SNPs associated with BMI, then estimated their overall contribution to BMI by multiple regression and verified it by permutation.
Results:
We identified 12 SNPs that made statistically significant contributions to BMI. After controlling for gender and age, four of these SNPs accounted for 7.7% additional variance of BMI. Permutation analysis showed that the probability of obtaining these findings by chance was low (p = 0.015, permuted for 1000 times).
Conclusion:
These results showed that genetic variations in the serotoninergic system made a moderate contribution to individual differences in BMI among a healthy Chinese sample, suggesting that a similar approach can be used to study obesity.
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