With respect to clinical practice, results indicate that, for persons in middle age, GWAS SNP-based approaches to obesity risk assessment offer little in the absence of more detailed information about lifestyle and environment. Although genetic information reliably predicted risk for obesity over and above demographics and geography, the magnitude of this additional risk was insufficient to recommend our score for use in clinical risk assessments. This result is especially important in the context of questions over consumer genomics services 49. Our 3-stage approach derived a more comprehensive genetic risk assessment for obesity than those currently used by companies marketing genomics services directly to consumers. The very modest risk information furnished by our GRS recommends caution on the part of health professionals in interpreting risk information provided by consumer genomics companies. The standard of evidence used here—multi-method assessment of predictiveness in large, population-based samples--should be considered a minimum standard for the validity of such risk information.
