The importance of the 16q12.2/FTO locus for obesity-related traits was identified in genome-wide scans of Europeans. These scans highlighted several variants within the FTO intron 1, all of which, except for rs6499640, are in high LD with each other in EA [1]–[7]. Consistently these studies showed an increase in BMI (∼1.1% to 1.3% per risk allele; [7]). However, AA studies showed very limited or no evidence for an association with rs9939609 [2],[5],[6],[14],[18],[28]–[31], rs1121980 [18], [19], [28], [30], [31], rs17817449 [18], [19], [28]–[31], or the previously reported functional variant rs8050136 [2], [6], [19], [27]–[29], [31], [32]. We observed nominal evidence for association with BMI for rs17817449 and rs8050136, but results were not among the most significant associations. rs1421085 was significantly associated in our study (p = 3×10−4;Table S2) and was also found to be associated in the study from Nock et al. [29] (n = 469, p-value = 7×10−4), Hassanein et al. [31] (n = 4,217, p-value = 3×10−4), and Hester et al. [32] (n = 4,992, p-value = 0.07) but not with four smaller AA studies (≤1000 AA subjects) [5],
