Investigation of potential genomic biomarkers for obesity and personalized medicine

Obesity, as a global health issue, is a complex metabolic syndrome and its association with many chronic diseases. The pathology of obesity results from an interaction of psychological, environmental and variety of genetic factors. Etiologic determinants and molecular pathophysiology of obesity have not yet understood clearly. Previously shown that genetic markers have a significant role in the development of obesity, although results are divergent with populations. Turkish Cypriots have a unique mixture of allele distributions as being a small-islander population. Therefore, the current study was aimed to evaluate the association between obesity and three putative obesity-related ADIPOQ, FTO and ACE gene markers, respectively. We investigated a possible association of ADIPOQ rs2241766 G>T, FTO rs9939609 A>T and ACE rs4340288 DIP variants among obese and non-obese Turkish Cypriot origin. Additionally, the correlation between these variants and biochemical and physical measurements were also evaluated to determine the possible biomarker for obesity in the population. Only FTO rs9939609 A>T polymorphism was associated with obesity and no association was observed with ADIPOQ rs2441666 G>T and ACE rs4340288 DIP. To conclude, FTO rs9939609 A allele found to have strong association with obesity in the population of Turkish Cypriots.