The 1,500 most significant SNPs from Stage 1 were examined in an additional 6,817 individuals, with each SNP being analyzed as described for Stage 1 and meta-analyzed using the inverse-variance method using METAL. As in Stage 1, each SNP was tested for association with BMI by regressing the transformed residuals on the number of copies of the SNP effect allele, adjusting for population structure as measured by the first ten eigenvectors calculated for each study. Further testing of the 3 novel variants was conducted in an additional 25,451 individuals (Stage 3). Results from all stages were meta-analyzed using the inverse-variance method in METAL.
