BMI prediction within a Korean population

Abstract

Background. Body Mass Index (BMI) is widely regarded as an important clinical traitfor obesity and other diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, andosteoarthritis.Methods. This study uses 6,011 samples of genotype data from ethnic Korean subjects.The data was retrieved from the Korea Association Resource. To identify the BMIrelatedmarkers within the Korean population, we collected genome-wide associationstudy (GWAS) markers using a GWAS catalog and also obtained other markers fromnearby regions. Of the total 6,011 samples, 5,410 subjects were used as part of a singlenucleotide polymorphism (SNP) selection set in order to identify the overlapping BMIassociatedSNPs within a 10-fold cross validation.Results. We selected nine SNPs (rs12566985 (FPGT-TNNI3K), rs6545809 (ADCY3),rs2943634 (located near LOC646736), rs734597 (located near TFAP2B), rs11030104(BDNF), rs7988412 (GTF3A), rs2241423 (MAP2K5), rs7202116 (FTO), and rs6567160(located near LOC105372152) to assist in BMI prediction. The calculated weightedgenetic risk scores based on the selected 9 SNPs within the SNP selection set wereapplied to the final validation set consisting of 601 samples. Our results showed upwardtrends in the BMI values (P <0:0001) within the 10-fold cross validation process forR2 >0:22. These trends were also observed within the validation set for all subjects, aswell as within the validation sets divided by gender (P <0:0001, R2 >0:46).Discussion. The set of nine SNPs identified in this study may be useful for prospectivepredictions of BMI.