Results (β and SEs for lnBMI) were combined with fixed-effects meta-analysis weighting the effect size estimates (β-coefficients) by their estimated standard errors, using METAL [56]. We evaluated Q-statistic and I2 as a measure of heterogeneity [57], [58], to describe the presence or absence of excess variation between the PAGE cohorts. For ease of interpretation, we calculated the % change in BMI per copy of the effect allele based on the beta for the lnBMI. To graphically display the results, we used LocusZoom [59]. We tested for independence of findings by including the most significant variant and each of the other variant into the same model (i.e. we included 2 variants simultaneously in one model). We evaluated if SNPs are independent by investigating the p-value. For an independent SNP the p-value would remain low/similar after adjusted for the most significant SNP.
