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Obesity is a heritable disease, characterised by excess adiposity that is measured by body mass index (BMI). While over 1,000 genetic loci are associated with BMI, less is known about the genetic contribution to adiposity trajectories over adulthood. We derive adiposity-change phenotypes from 24.5 million primary-care health records in over 740,000 individuals in the UK Biobank, Million Veteran Program USA, and Estonian Biobank, to discover and validate the genetic architecture of adiposity trajectories. Using multiple BMI measurements over time increases power to identify genetic factors affecting baseline BMI by 14%. In the largest reported genome-wide study of adiposity-change in adulthood, we identify novel associations with BMI-change at six independent loci, including rs429358 (APOE missense variant). The SNP-based heritability of BMI-change (1.98%) is 9-fold lower than that of BMI. The modest genetic correlation between BMI-change and BMI (45.2%) indicates that genetic studies of longitudinal trajectories could uncover novel biology of quantitative traits in adulthood., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Various personality traits are known to correlate with body mass index (BMI). However, this index of adiposity conflates fat mass with lean body mass and may therefore lead to biased estimates of correlations. Yet, rarely have studies looked beyond BMI to understand how adiposity and other physiological characteristics relate to these psychological traits. Using previously validated formulas, we calculated an improved measure of adiposity (relative fat mass, RFM), as well as basal metabolic rate (BMR); explored their associations with various personality traits; and assessed how personality traits' associations with RFM differ from their associations with BMI. In a subsample of the Estonian Biobank (N = 3535), we compared how the five domains and 30 facets of NEO Personality Inventory-3 correlated with RFM, BMI, and BMR. Various traits, notably Openness to Experience and its facets, were associated with RFM above and beyond BMI; these traits may relate to lower adiposity through eating habits. Assertiveness, a facet of Extraversion, correlated more strongly with BMI than with RFM and also correlated with BMR. These correlations mirror associations of metabolic rate with conceptually similar traits in non-human animals and are consistent with Assertiveness being based on biological processes. Finally, BMI-personality trait correlations appeared to conflate personality traits' associations with fat mass and lean mass; the use of BMI as an indicator of adiposity can lead to both attenuated and inflated estimates of personality trait-adiposity associations., (Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Inc.)