The obesity epidemic is one of the most important health challenges of the 21st century.
Identifying genetic factors predisposing to weight gain is crucial for identifying biological processes important for weight-control and help identify individuals already at young age that might benefit from health interventions and thereby reducing their risk for disorders such as type 2 diabetes that follow in its footpath.

While there is great progress deciphering the genetic factors influencing weight in in adulthood, and at birth, there is a huge knowledge gap on the role of the genomes of the child and its parents in infancy and childhood into puberty. This is very unfortunate, as it is firmly established that the BMI-development during the first 6 years of life are strong predictors of obesity in adolescence . Results from our own ongoing work in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child and work of others show that it is possible to find novel genetic variants with specific and substantial effect on weight development during infancy with high quality data and large GWAS sample sizes.