Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for height and body mass index in ∼700000 individuals of European ancestry

Abstract

Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of height and body mass index (BMI) in ∼250000 European participants have led to the discovery of ∼700 and ∼100 nearly independent single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with these traits, respectively. Here we combine summary statistics from those two studies with GWAS of height and BMI performed in ∼450000 UK Biobank participants of European ancestry. Overall, our combined GWAS meta-analysis reaches N ∼700000 individuals and substantially increases the number of GWAS signals associated with these traits. We identified 3290 and 941 near-independent SNPs associated with height and BMI, respectively (at a revised genome-wide significance threshold of P < 1 × 10-8), including 1185 height-associated SNPs and 751 BMI-associated SNPs loca