After confirming the association of rs1659258 with measures of adiposity in a sex-specific manner, we next sought to perform association studies with correlated metabolic traits. Because VAT is associated with glycemic and lipid traits [20], [34]–[37], we requested sex-specific associations of rs1659258 in the Global Lipids Genetics Consortium [38] for lipid traits and in the MAGIC consortium for traits related to glucose metabolism. Overall, we observed a nominal and direction-consistent association (i.e., same allele associated with higher VAT and lower HDL) with HDL (p = 0.019, n = 98,263), but no robust associations for LDL, triglycerides, or total cholesterol (all p>0.06), which is surprising given the phenotypic correlations between VAT and triglycerides [20]. In sex-specific analyses, we observed no association for this SNP with HDL, triglycerides, or total cholesterol for either women (all p>0.09, personal communication) or men (all p>0.73, personal communication). In MAGIC, we observed a direction-consistent and borderline statistically significant result for this SNP in women (p = 0.048, n = 43,754) but not men (p = 0.39, n = 36,514) for fasting glucose (personal communication, MAGIC consortium).
