No systematic reviews are available of sex differences in GWA studies. Therefore, we reviewed all available GWA studies for Height on sex-specific analyses and/or results. We selected this phenotype because it met criteria proposed in Visscher et al [19]: at least three GWAS papers published in journals with a 2010–2011 journal impact factor >9 and at least one paper containing 10 or more genome-wide significant loci. We considered all GWA studies published until the second quarter of 2011, and found 19 that included the phenotype Height [20]. In eleven studies sex-effects were considered in some way. One study reported sex-heterogeneity at 3 SNPs, and one study reports a larger effect size in females for 1 SNP, while the other studies did not detect sex-specific loci (See Table S8). In conclusion, sex-specific effects were small or absent, with only a few exceptions. This is in line with our observations in the present paper. We did not detect qualitative sex-differences in adult height, and some small differences in the height data of children.
