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A newly developed tool can assess a person’s risk for becoming obese based on genetic variants at more than 2 million loci in the genome, researchers report today (April 18) in Cell.
“We’ve had evidence for a long time that obesity is affected by genetics. What this really adds is the ability to distill the risk from the genome into a simple number for each person and look at that number in relation to the rest of the population,” study coauthor Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells WBUR.
Kathiresan’s team developed an algorithm linking body mass index (BMI) to 2.1 million genetic variants, and validated its accuracy in predicting BMI from genetics using a dataset of 100,000 people. The researchers then applied the risk assessment to more than 300,000 people, finding those who scored on the high end were 13 kg heavier ...
