To further compare genetic inheritance of the tails with the full distribution, we used a ‘polygene approach.’45 The meta-analysis results of tails and full distribution were used to create two polygenetic scores (by summing the number of risk alleles at each SNP) in six studies (Supplementary Table 13). We found that the polygene score based on the full BMI distribution consistently explained more of the variance than the score based on the tails (e.g. 15.3% vs. 6.4% at P<0.05) (Fig. 2, Supplementary Table 14). Similar results were observed for height and WHR (Supplementary Fig. 10). On liability scale, the variance explained by the two polygene scores was similar for different BMI-related outcomes (Supplementary Fig. 11) and different percentile cutpoints used to define the tails (data not shown), suggesting that the fraction of the overall variance explained by SNPs is not influenced by the outcome categorization, but by the ability to accurately rank and estimate the beta coefficients of the association, which is better achieved by using the entire study population instead of the tails. Our results also indicate that genetic
