In our meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of up to 263,407 individuals of European ancestry, we identified 165 loci associated with tails (upper vs. lower 5th percentile) of BMI, height, and WHR and/or clinical classes of obesity. Eleven of these loci have not previously been associated with anthropometric traits. Several of the novel loci were located near strong biological candidate genes, such as IGFBP4 and SHOX2 for tails of height, and HNF4G and ADCY9 for overweight/obesity class I, suggesting future areas of research. Although by using different distribution cutoffs we discovered additional loci that would not have been identified as genome-wide significant using the full distribution of the same study samples, there is no evidence to suggest that the clinical classes of obesity are etiologically distinct, and the majority of evidence indicates that the extremes share many of the same loci with the general population.
