By focusing on WHR after adjustment for BMI, our goal was to detect effects on body fat distribution independent of those influencing overall adiposity. As expected, we found very little evidence that known BMI-associated variants were detected in our WHR analysis. Of the 10 loci identified shown to be associated with BMI in previous genome-wide association studies 14,15,18, only two showed nominally significant (P < 0.05) associations for BMI-adjusted WHR in the discovery analysis (FTO: rs805013614, P = 0.03, N = 77,074; TMEM18: rs654823815, P = 3.0 × 10−3, N = 77,016).
