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Approved Research

Associations of early-life factors, genes, adulthood factors, and diseases

Principal Investigator: Professor Shunqing Xu
Approved Research ID: 96054
Approval date: April 4th 2023

Lay summary

The rising prevalence of adulthood diseases such as type-2 diabetes and obesity has been recognized as a public health problem globally. In addition to lifestyle, environmental factors in adulthood, and genetic variations, developmental conditions in early life also have essential roles in adult health and disease. However, studies considering multi factors, such as early-life, genetic, life-long weight/body-size changes, and adulthood risk factors, simultaneously in predicting diseases are still lacking. Therefore, we intend to investigate and quantify the associations of early-life factors, genes, adulthood factors, the combination of these factors, and diseases using the UK Biobank database.

This project will last for 36 months.

Findings from this project will facilitate targeted preventive strategies for adult diseases with cost-effectiveness by modifying factors closely associated with the risk factors contributing the most to diseases, such as early life, genetic, or adulthood factors.

We propose to use the whole UK Biobank cohort in our analysis.