Soon after the discovery of FTO in European ancestry populations, many replication efforts examined its effects in non-European ancestry populations, showing convincing support for the generalizability of FTO as an obesity-susceptibility locus across most ancestries studied so far. The most consistent replications have been observed for Asian ancestry populations. Besides the fact that the three large-scale GWAS in East Asians identified FTO SNPs as the most significantly associated with BMI23-25, targeted efforts consistently confirmed association with obesity-related traits in Chinese,31-39 Japanese,40-44 Koreans,45,46 Vietnamese,47 Filipino,48 Malays,31 and Indian Asians.49-57 A meta-analysis that combined data of 96,551 individuals of Asian ancestry, showed that each additional minor allele increases risk of obesity (using Asian BMI cut-offs) by 1.25 fold, which is similar to effects observed in European ancestry populations.58 BMI increases by 0.26 kg/m2 (equivalent to 750g for a person 1.7m tall) for each additional minor allele,58 which is substantially less than in European ancestry populations and might reflect the fact that BMI represents a somewhat different adiposity phenotype in different Asians. Effect sizes of East and South Asians were not significantly different,
