Different nutritional components and cognition: from phenotype to gene

With the extension of human life expectancy, mild cognitive impairments and dementias are becoming increasingly a threat and a great health and social cost to inflicted individuals, their families and healthcare systems. Nutritional factors have attracted much attention as potential targets for prevention and treatment. However there is a lack of evidences of specific types of nutritional components may offset or elevate the cognitive decline and dementia. Thus, based on the abundant, comprehensive, and complete genomic, metabolomic, environmental and clinical information from UK Biobank database, we aim to retrospectively (logistic regression analysis)and prospectively (cox regression analysis) determine the nutritional exposure factors associated with dementia, and furtherly conduct a MR analysis to investigate the causual relationship.This project asks a few specific questions: (1) does different nutritional components(e.g., energy, protein, vitamin ,mineral ) related to cognitive decline and dementia? (2) does different nutritional components (e.g., energy, protein, vitamin ,mineral ) related to different types of dementia such as vascular dementia? (3) does genes related to different nutritional components (e.g., energy, protein, vitamin ,mineral ) have a causual relationship with cognitive decline and dementia? Our results will help individuals to modify or adjust their nutritional protocols(e.g., diets, tonic ) to achieve precision prevention for cognitive diseases.The project duration is 3 years.