As expected, the effect sizes of the 18 newly discovered loci are slightly smaller, for a given minor allele frequency, than those of the previously identified variants (Table 1 and Fig. 1c). The increased sample size also brought out more signals with low minor allele frequency. The BMI-increasing allele frequencies for the 18 newly identified variants ranged from 4% to 87%, covering more of the allele frequency spectrum than previous, smaller GWA studies of BMI (24%–83%)9,10 (Table 1 and Fig. 1c).
