Family studies have suggested a substantial co-inheritance of the timing of puberty and BMI34, and this is supported by our finding of four established BMI variants among our novel menarche loci. We therefore systematically assessed whether established loci for adiposity-related traits (BMI, waist-hip ratio (WHR) and obesity), and adult height, were also associated with age at menarche. Nine of the 12 BMI loci and 2 of the 4 WHR loci tested were associated with age at menarche (Table 2 and Supplementary Table 13). In all cases the BMI- or WHR-increasing allele was associated with earlier menarche, which is consistent with the direction of association in epidemiological studies35. 11 of the 44 adult height loci were associated with age at menarche (Table 3 and Supplementary Table 14). However, for 7 of these loci, the adult height-increasing allele was associated with earlier menarche, which is in the opposite direction to the association in individual-level epidemiological studies35.
