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Obesity is a serious health concern for children and adolescents, particularly in Western societies, where its incidence is now considered to have reached epidemic proportions. A number of genetic determinants of adult BMI have already been established through genome wide association studies (GWAS), most recently from the GIANT meta-analysis of such datasets combined. In this current study of European Americans, we examined the 32 loci detected in that GIANT study in the context of common childhood obesity within a cohort of 1,097 cases (defined as BMI ≥95th percentile), together with 2,760 lean controls (defined as BMI <50th percentile), aged between 2 and 18 years old. Nine of these single-nucleotide polymorphims (SNPs) yielded at least nominal evidence for association with common childhood obesity, namely at the FTO, TMEM18, NRXN3, MC4R, SEC16B, GNPDA2, TNNI3K, QPCTL, and BDNF loci. However, overall 28 of the 32 loci showed directionally consistent effects to that of the adult BMI meta-analysis. We conclude that among the 32 loci that have been reported to associate with adult BMI in the largest meta-analysis of BMI to date, at least nine also contribute to the determination of common obesity in childhood in European Americans, as demonstrated by their associations in our pediatric cohort.

Objective: A number of studies have found that reduced birth weight is associated with type 2 diabetes later in life; however, the underlying mechanism for this correlation remains unresolved. Recently, association has been demonstrated between low birth weight and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at the CDKAL1 and HHEX-IDE loci, regions that were previously implicated in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes. In order to investigate whether type 2 diabetes risk-conferring alleles associate with low birth weight in our Caucasian childhood cohort, we examined the effects of 20 such loci on this trait., Research Design and Methods: Using data from an ongoing genome-wide association study in our cohort of 5,465 Caucasian children with recorded birth weights, we investigated the association of the previously reported type 2 diabetes-associated variation at 20 loci including TCF7L2, HHEX-IDE, PPARG, KCNJ11, SLC30A8, IGF2BP2, CDKAL1, CDKN2A/2B, and JAZF1 with birth weight., Results: Our data show that the minor allele of rs7756992 (P = 8 x 10(-5)) at the CDKAL1 locus is strongly associated with lower birth weight, whereas a perfect surrogate for variation previously implicated for the trait at the same locus only yielded nominally significant association (P = 0.01; r(2) rs7756992 = 0.677). However, association was not detected with any of the other type 2 diabetes loci studied., Conclusions: We observe association between lower birth weight and type 2 diabetes risk-conferring alleles at the CDKAL1 locus. Our data show that the same genetic locus that has been identified as a marker for type 2 diabetes in previous studies also influences birth weight.