We set out to validate these 5 scores—and to choose the best score for further analysis—by testing their ability to predict measured BMI in a validation dataset of 119,951 middle-aged adult participants of the UK Biobank. The UK Biobank enrolled participants aged 40 to 69 years from across the United Kingdom and allows for linkage of measurements such as BMI to extensive genetic data (Bycroft et al., 2018; Sudlow et al., 2015). Within this dataset we estimated the heritability of BMI explained by common variants to be 23.4% using a recently developed approach (Bulik-Sullivan et al., 2015), consistent with prior estimates ranging from 17 to 27% (Yang et al., 2015; Yang et al., 2011; Zhu et al., 2015).
