We conducted a two-stage study among individuals of European descent (Supplementary Table 1 and Online Methods). In the discovery stage, up to 2,850,269 imputed and genotyped single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were examined in 32 GWA studies comprising up to 77,167 participants informative for anthropometric measures of body fat distribution. We performed a fixed-effects meta-analysis of WHR, employing study-specific linear regression adjusted for BMI and age, stratified by gender, and using an additive genetic model. After genomic control adjustment per study and in the meta-analysis, these analyses revealed a substantial excess of low p-values (Figure 1 a, b).
