Response to “FTO Gene Polymorphisms Are Associated With Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes in East Asian Populations: An Update”

Abstract

TO THE EDITOR: We have read the letter to the editor written by Bo Xi et al. titled “FTO Gene Polymorphisms Are Associated With Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes in East Asian Populations: An Update (1).” In the letter, they raised three aspects of our article, and we would like to give a rebuttal to the three aspects, respectively. 1. They claimed that we missed three studies in our meta-analysis, but the study conducted by Ng et al. (2) on the association of rs8050136 and obesity only referred obesity in one sentence in the results part, as Ng et al. defined obesity criteria as BMI ≥25 kg/m2, the criteria did not meet our standard (obesity should be BMI ≥28 kg/m2) to do our meta-analysis as we considered that FTO seemed to be associated with severe obese status, and we proposed the viewpoint in the discussion part of our article. The Lee's article (3) and the Yajnik's article (4) were both published after we conducted our meta-analysis, so we did not include these two articles. 2. We conducted a meta-analysis in Asian population that of course included Asian Indians. In European population, the minor allele frequency (MAF) of FTO SNP is ≥0.40, but in Asian population, the MAF is lower than in European population that included Asian Indians. So we thought it was appropriate to include Asian Indians in Asian population to conduct our meta-analysis. 3. It seems we made a citation mistake in citing Song's data (5), thank Bo Xi to point it out. We regret to the mistake we made. The results of Bo Xi's meta-analysis of FTO and type 2 diabetes and obesity also support our results, which give a support to our study. The authors declared no conflict of interest.