Research Question
Frailty and Sarcopenia represent core geriatric syndromes that frequently co-occur and form a clinical phenotype of accelerated aging, strongly predicting the development of a spectrum of other chronic diseases, including cardiovascular, metabolic, and cognitive disorders, leading to multimorbidity. Despite their clinical significance, the integrative causal pathways linking genetic predisposition, multi-omics dysregulation (proteomic, metabolomic), and environmental factors to the onset and progression of frailty, sarcopenia, and their subsequent multimorbidity networks remain systematically uncharacterized.
Objectives
To delineate the causal architecture linking frailty and sarcopenia to multimorbidity by integrating genetic, multi-omics, and clinical data from the UK Biobank. This project aims to identify the shared and distinct biological drivers of these core aging phenotypes to enable early identification of at-risk individuals and inform targeted interventions to prevent or delay the cascade into multimorbidity.
Scientific Rationale
Uncover the Core Biological Mechanisms of Aging-Related Health Decline by moving beyond single-disease siloes to target the integrative physiological dysregulation that underlies multiple conditions. Enable the Identification of Early, Preclinical Biomarkers for individuals on a trajectory towards frailty, sarcopenia, and severe multimorbidity, long before clinical symptoms become overt.