In our analysis, rs56137030 was most significantly associated with BMI. In EA, rs56137030 has a similarly high allele frequecy as the previously reported GWAS index SNPs (A allele frequency = 0.42) and was highly correlated with the GWAS index SNPs (r2≥0.87), except for rs6499640 (r2 = 0.12), which is also not strongly correlated with any of the other GWAS index SNPs in EA or AA. In AA, the correlation between rs56137030 and GWAS index SNPs varied substantially (r2 = 0.001 to 0.73), demonstrating that studying AA can substantially reduce the bin of correlated SNPs defined by the index signal identified in EA. Specifically, the number of SNPs correlated with rs56137030 at r2>0.5 was 103 in EA, but only 28 in AA. Including these 28 SNPs together with rs56137030 in conditional analyses showed that the significance of each of the SNPs, as well as rs56137030, was substantially reduced, supporting the idea that any of the highly correlated SNPs is a potential functional candidate. rs56137030 and all 28 highly correlated SNPs are non-coding, suggesting that the functional variant is likely to have
