African-Americans have the highest age-adjusted rates of obesity in the U.S. Now, an NIH study is offering clues to why that is.
Researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), University of Lagos, University of Nigeria, Kwame Nkumrah University of Science and Technology, University of Ghana, and University of Maryland collaborated in a study and found about 1 % of West Africans, African-Americans, and others of African ancestry carry a genomic variant that increases their risk of obesity. People with the genomic differences were about 6 pounds heavier than those without the variant.
This is the first study to use a Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) to investigate the genomic basis of obesity in continental Africans. Most previous studies on obesity using a GWAS have examined people of European ancestry. Those studies would not have found the genomic variant for the African descendants which is absent in Europeans and Asians. “We wanted to close this unacceptable gap in genomics research,” said Charles Rotimi, PhD, chief of NHGRI’s Metabolic, Cardiovascular and Inflammatory Disease Genomics Branch and director of the NIH Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health.
“By studying people of West Africa, the ancestral home of most African-Americans, and replicating our results in a large group of African-Americans,” said Ayo Doumatey, PhD, study co-lead and CRGGH staff scientist, “we are providing new insights into biological pathways for obesity that have not been previously explored.”