We first performed a meta-analysis of GWAS for BMD of the femoral neck (FN-BMD; n=32,961) and lumbar spine (LS-BMD; n=31,800) including ~2.5 million autosomal genotyped or imputed SNPs from 17 studies from populations across North America, Europe, East Asia and Australia, with a variety of epidemiological designs and patient characteristics (see Online Methods). We also performed meta-analysis in men and women separately to identify sex-specific associations. The quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plots of the discovery meta-analysis displayed strong (and not early) deviation of the observed statistics from the null distribution for both BMD traits (Supplementary Fig. 1). After double Genomic Control (GC) correction of the overall (λFN_POOLED=1.112; λLS_POOLED=1.127) and sex-stratified analyses (λFN_WOMEN=1.091; λFN_MEN=1.059; λLS_WOMEN=1.086; λLS_MEN=1.061), SNPs in 34 loci surpassed GWS level while a total of 82 loci were associated at P<5×10−6 (Supplementary Fig. 2–3). Thirty eight loci were associated with FN-BMD, 25 with LS-BMD and 19 with both. The overlap reflects the correlation between the femoral neck and lumbar spine measurements (Pearson correlation = 0.53). Of these 82 loci, 59, 18 and 5 were prioritized from the analysis in the sex-combined,
