We conducted a two-stage study for the tails of three anthropometric traits (BMI, WHR, and height) and four clinical classes of obesity (overweight and obesity classes I, II, and III), followed by a combined analysis of the two stages. Stage 1 consisted of a meta-analysis of GWAS utilizing data from a study base (or sampling frame) of up to 168,267 adult individuals of European ancestry from 51 studies participating in the Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits (GIANT) consortium (Supplementary Tables 1-5). In stage 2, 273 SNPs with P-values < 5×10-6 were followed up in up to 109,703 additional individuals of European descent, which included 67,243 individuals from 24 studies with data from the Metabochip (a custom-designed array of ~200,000 SNPs with prior evidence of suggestive association with metabolic traits), and 42,460 individuals from 12 studies with in silico replication GWAS data (Supplemental Tables 1-5). This gave us a study base of up to 276,007 individuals of European descent for the joint meta-analysis of stage 1 and stage 2. For full details about the discovery and replication stages, analysis of data, and meta-analyses, see Supplementary Note.
