{"doi":"10.1002/gepi.70009","title":"Three Loci Affecting Variance of Body Mass Index in African Americans and Sub‐Saharan Africans","abstract":"Conventional genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are designed to assess the effect of a genetic locus on phenotypic mean by genotype. Such loci explain a proportion of phenotypic variance known as narrow-sense heritability. In contrast, variance quantitative trait loci (vQTL) are associated with the phenotypic variance by genotype. These loci explain an additional proportion of phenotypic variance and contribute to broad-sense heritability but not to narrow-sense heritability. Here, a genome-wide vQTL analysis in 22,805 African Americans yielded eight loci for body mass index (BMI). Of these loci, three were replicated in 6002 sub-Saharan Africans. No locus reached genome-wide significance using the standard additive model. Furthermore, no locus showed evidence for natural selection, haplotype effects, or gene × sex or gene × study interactions. Two loci showed evidence for an effect of locus-specific ancestry resulting from admixture and for a gene × gene interaction. One locus showed evidence for interaction with diastolic blood pressure, consistent with this vQTL capturing an unmodeled gene × covariate interaction. These analyses demonstrate that relevant BMI loci can be detected by evaluating vQTL and that these loci contribute to the underexplored broad-sense heritability for this trait.","journal":"Genetic Epidemiology","year":2025,"id":565318,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.945,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":247720,"name":"Amy R. Bentley","orcid":"0000-0002-0827-9101","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":255884,"name":"Ayo P. Doumatey","orcid":"0000-0001-9494-7710","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1468766,"name":"Jie Zhou","orcid":"0009-0009-5935-8051","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":516565,"name":"Guanjie Chen","orcid":"0000-0002-5745-5618","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":35213,"name":"Charles N. Rotimi","orcid":"0000-0001-5759-053X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":231134,"name":"Adebowale Adeyemo","orcid":"0000-0002-3105-3231","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":130256,"name":"Daniel Shriner","orcid":"0000-0003-1928-5520","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":34,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:56:28.709936Z","pmid":"40323147","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}