Our strategy for identifying common variants influencing central adiposity is summarized in Figure 1. The study was based on an initial (“stage 1”) meta-analysis of GWAS data to identify SNPs strongly-associated with measures of central adiposity (see Table S2). We then focused our “stage 2” follow-up efforts on the subset of those signals for which the strength of the evidence of association for measures of central adiposity (WC and WHR) appeared to be substantially stronger than that observed for overall adiposity and/or height. We reasoned that this subset of signals would be enriched for variants with preferential influences on central fat accumulation.
