The Anorexia Nervosa Genetics Initiative (ANGI), an initiative of The Klarman Family Foundation, is the largest and most rigorous genetic investigation of eating disorders ever conducted. Dr. Cynthia Bulik at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the lead investigator of ANGI. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet played a major role in the completion of ANGI (Prof. Mikael Landén [ANGI KI lead investigator], Dr. Andreas Birgegård, Dr. Claes Norring, and Prof. Paul Lichtenstein).
Other participating universities included Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark (Dr. Preben Bo Mortensen), and Berghofer Queensland Institute for Medical Research, Brisbane, Australia (Dr. Nick Martin) with assistance from the University of Otago, Christchurch, New Zealand (Drs. Martin Kennedy and Jenny Jordan).
ANGI represents a global effort to detect genetic variation that contributes to this potentially life-threatening illness. In total, ANGI collected biological samples and clinical information from 13,363 individuals with anorexia nervosa as well as healthy controls who were matched by ancestry and geography. The Karolinska site contributed samples from 4247 individuals with anorexia nervosa and 4035 healthy control individuals!
Recruitment for ANGI is currently closed and results will be available on this website soon.
If you are a researcher interested in accessing data or biological samples from ANGI, click here for details. Genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics will be available after publication on the Downloads page of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium website.
The ANGI team is grateful to all participants worldwide, to the research teams in the USA, Europe, and Australasia who helped create this unprecedented resource, and to all of the clinicians, researchers, bloggers, journalists, family members, advocates, and individuals with lived experienced who joined us in our collaborative effort to make ANGI a reality.