predictive of type II diabetes, though algorithms including family history and additional risk factors perform better (Meigs et al. 2008; Talmud et al. 2010). GRSS have also been applied to BMI and obesity in populations of European and Chinese descent which incorporated 8–15 variants and accounted for 0.5–1.12% of the phenotypic variance (Thorleifsson et al. 2009; Willer et al. 2009; Renstrm et al. 2009; Zhao et al. 2009; Li et al. 2010; Cheung et al. 2010). Presently, BMI GRSS have only incorporated genome-wide significant variants. However, research by Evans et al.(2009) suggests that in some cases, including bipolar disorder, coronary heart disease, hypertension and type II diabetes, using liberal thresholds (α = 0.5) for SNP selection in GRSS may improve predictive ability.
