Study subjects
Korean Association Resource (KARE) study was collected through the Korean Genome Epidemiologic Study project - in total, 10,038 people, 40-69 years old, living in Ansung and Ansan, from 2001-2002. For more information, the study has already been reported [9, 15]. The Health Examinee cohort (HEXA) shared project is a community-based epidemiological cohort of 1,200,000 subjects (aged, 40-69) who were recruited for baseline examination from 2004 to 2009. To share the controls, 4,302 subjects were randomly selected to participate between 2006 and 2007. The BioBank Japan study was approved by the ethical committees in the Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo, and the Center for Genomic Medicine, RIKEN. Subjects for the Health2 cohorts for the replication study were selected from another community-based cohort sample provided by the Health2 study, as described previously [15]. We examined 7,861 selected from the 8,500 participants (aged, 40-69). The students aged 9 and 12 years were recruited from Gwacheon City and Gyeonggi Province between April and June 2010. This study was conducted as part of the Korean Children-Adolescents Study (KoCAS), which has been monitored yearly since their entry into elementary school at age 7 in Gwacheon City or fourth grade at age 10 in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, Korea. Subjects who were enrolled in a specific diet program or were taking any medications known to affect appetite were excluded from the study. The study protocol was approved by the institutional review board of Seoul-Paik Hospital, Inje University, and the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Informed consent was obtained from the children's parents.