Obesity risk-allele distributions were similar for males and females, but were different for whites and African Americans. The variance of the un-weighted GRS was greater for whites as compared to African Americans (SD= 3.50 as compared to 3.25, p<0.001 using Brown and Forsythe’s method 39), as was the mean (M=28.80 as compared to 24.87, p<0.001 using t-test for unequal variances; see also Supplementary Figure 1) This difference reflected lower frequencies of BMI-increasing alleles for several GRS SNPs among African American ARIC participants (Table 1). Subsequent analyses were stratified by race.
