FTO and chronic kidney disease: Furthermore, obesity has been reported to be an independent risk factor for ESRD by a large historical cohort study of 177,570 adults after adjustment for multiple epidemiologic and clinical conditions including diabetes [27] Moreover, a FTO variant, rs17817449, which are in absolute linkage disequilibrium to rs56094641, was shown to be associated with ESRD [28], suggesting FTO variants confer susceptibility to CKD/ESRD through the mechanisms mediated by obesity/adipocity.