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Influences of FTO gene on onset age of adult overweight

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Abstract

FTO affects changes in BMI during both childhood and adulthood. However, its effect on onset age of overweight in adulthood is not known. To address this question, we conducted a study to examine effects of FTO tag SNPs on censored age of overweight in the longitudinal Bogalusa Heart Study (BHS) cohort, which began in 1973–1974. Of participating subjects, 658 whites (308 males and 350 females) with genotype data were selected for the study. The FTO gene was examined by a survival analysis of 30 tag SNPs regarding their association with left, interval and right-censored adult overweight. After adjustment for birth weight and sex, SNP rs9939609 has a small nominal p value of 0.004 for the association with onset age, which has an expected proportion of false positives of 9.6 % after adjusting for multiple tests. It was estimated that genotypes AA, AT and TT have onset age (standard error) of 22.82 (1.07), 28.96 (1.04) and 27.76 (1.04) years, respectively, for a 50 % cumulative proportion of overweight in the population. Genotypes AA, AT and TT, respectively, have estimated survival probability of 65.8, 78.7 and 76.8 % at the age of 18; and survival probability of 6.5, 11.8 and 10.7 % at the age of 60. The odds ratios of survival beyond age ≥18 years are 0.52 for AA versus AT and 0.58 for AA versus TT. We thus concluded that risk genetic variants at FTO gene can accelerate the onset age and influence the survival odds of overweight in younger adults.

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Abbreviations

FTO:

Fat mass and obesity associated

SNP:

Single-nucleotide polymorphism

GWAS:

Genome-wide association studies

BMI:

Body mass index

LD:

Linkage disequilibrium

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by grants HD-061437 and HD-062783 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 0855082E from American Heart Association, AG-16592 from the National Institute on Aging and in part by NIH/NCRR Grant UL1 RR025774.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Hao Mei, Katherine Mills & Jiang He

  2. Tulane Center for Cardiovascular Health, Tulane University, 1440 Canal St, Suite 1829, New Orleans, LA, 70112, USA

    Wei Chen, Sathanur R. Srinivasan & Gerald S. Berenson

  3. Scripps Genomic Medicine and Scripps Translational Science Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Nicholas Schork & Sarah Murray

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  1. Hao Mei
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  2. Wei Chen
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Correspondence to Hao Mei or Gerald S. Berenson.

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Figure 1. The top three principal components of the study White sample (TIFF 96 kb)

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Mei, H., Chen, W., Mills, K. et al. Influences of FTO gene on onset age of adult overweight. Hum Genet 131, 1851–1859 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00439-012-1204-0

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