Given the widening spectrum of genetic variation demonstrated to be associated with common, complex traits, there is a need for genetic models integrating common and rare variants. In this study, we constructed a model that jointly incorporated the effects of common and rare (<1%) variants shown previously to be associated with obesity. First, genetic variants associated with BMI and obesity were catalogued from the literature, including common SNPs and common and rare CNVs. Next, genetic risk sum scores (GRSS), which summarize the total number of risk variants, were tested for association with BMI in 1850 Americans of European (EA) and 498 African (AA) descent from the Study of Addiction: Genetics and Environment (SAGE). Finally, we evaluated clinical utility of these models on the basis of discriminative ability to predict obesity classification.
