Obesity genetics

There’s actually a good story in the Herald about obesity and genetics, based on research in Samoa.  The researchers are interested in finding genetic relationships to understand the biological processes in obesity better. Polynesian peoples are relevant partly because of relatively high obesity rates, but also because each island group was settled by a relatively small number of people, leading to larger genetic differences between nations. It’s the same reason Icelanders are studied a lot by geneticists.

In this study, they found a genetic variant that is essentially non-existent in previously-studied populations (about 1 in 10,000 people) but present in almost half of their sample from Samoa.  People with the variant had, on average, a higher BMI by 1.4 kg/m², which is quite a lot for a genetic effect — at least five times larger than the most important variant previously known, and enough to perhaps be relevant for health. On the other hand, the genetic variant explains only about 1.5% of the variation in BMI between people in the study and less than 10% of the difference in average BMI between, say, Samoa and Japan.

There’s also evidence that the genetic variant has been advantageous to the ancestors of modern Samoans.  Genetic variants that have spread more rapidly through a population tend to have brought along larger chunks of the genome from the person where they first arose.  This shows up as correlation with a larger than usual set of neighbouring variants, which was seen here.  The main reason for a genetic variant to spread more rapidly is if it is beneficial, so that’s probably the explanation.  The story given about survival on long ocean voyages would make sense, but there isn’t any specific genetic evidence for that.

An obvious question is whether this genetic variant is present in other Polynesian populations, perhaps including Māori. No-one knows yet — they haven’t looked, and this is the sort of research where consulting in advance with iwi would be important.