To first evaluate the contribution of common SNPs to the tails and clinical classes of obesity and discover new loci, we conducted meta-analyses of GWAS of six obesity-related traits (tails of BMI and WHR, overweight, obesity class I, II and III), as well as tails of height, utilizing results for ~2.8 million genotyped or imputed SNPs. Stage 1 analyses included 51 studies with study bases of 158,864 (BMI), 168,267 (height) and 100,605 (WHR) individuals of European ancestry (see Supplementary Table 1 for number of cases and controls per phenotype; Supplementary 2-5 for study characteristics). We observed an enrichment of SNPs with small P-values compared to the null distribution for all seven traits (Q-Q plots, Supplementary Fig. 1-2). The excess was diminished after exclusion of loci previously established for the overall distributions or extremes of these traits, but some enrichment remained, especially for tails of height and to a lesser extent for overweight, obesity class I and II. In total, 69 loci (defined as separated by at least 1 Mb) were associated at P<5×10-8 with at least one trait (Supplementary Fig. 3-4).
