Results from analyses of the community-based data showed that BMI had risk effects on T2D (odds ratio, OR = 3.29), hypertensive disease (OR = 1.85), dermatophytosis (i.e., tinea) (OR = 1.67), peripheral vascular diseases (PVD) (OR = 1.59), osteoarthritis (OR = 1.50), dyslipidemia (OR = 1.37), asthma (OR = 1.35), and CVD (OR = 1.30). The risk effects of BMI on T2D, CVD, and hypertensive disease have been confirmed by RCT35 (Supplementary Data 1), providing proof-of-principle validation. The interpretation of OR(BMI→T2D) = 3.29 is that people whose BMI are 1 SD (SD = 3.98 for BMI in European men corresponding to ~12 kg of weight for men of 175 cm stature; see Supplementary Table 6 for the SD of the risk factors) above the population mean will have 3.29 times increase in risk to T2D compared with the population prevalence (~8% in the US). It is interesting to note that the estimate of bxy at the TCF7L2 locus strongly deviated from those at the other loci (Fig. 3), suggesting that the TCF7L2 SNP has pleotropic effects on BMI and T2D.
