Approved Research

Causal pathways of environmental and hereditary risk in common diseases: observational, metabolomic, and genetic studies

Lay summary

Most deaths world-wide result from common diseases, including heart attack, stroke, cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes. These and other diseases are steadily becoming more common, partly because more people reach higher ages, but also because more people world-wide smoke, are exposed to environmental pollution, eat more processed food, and exercise less.

The aims of this study are to:

-             Identify new risk factors that cause common diseases.

-             Uncover more about the ways in which known risk factors cause common diseases.

-             Describe the extent of the harm caused by specific risk factors, in terms of the number of people that become ill due to exposure.

Scientific rationale:

Earlier population studies have led to discovery of risk factors that cause disease, as for example elevated cholesterol that causes heart attack and stroke, genetic mutations that cause cancer, smoking that causes chronic lung diseases, and obesity that causes diabetes. This has spurred interventions for dealing with these risk factors, which has prevented many individuals from developing disease. However, many individuals still develop common diseases, and more work therefore needs to be done to identify new risk factors, learn more about existing risk factors, and describe the potential benefit of intervening to decrease such risk factors.

Risk factors that cause disease can be identified by studying the association between randomly distributed genetic variation associated with such risk factors. If there is an association, it can be tested if there is also an association between the genetic variation and a disease. If there is, it can in some cases be inferred that the risk factor causes the disease. This method is called Mendelian Randomization and is best when done in large population studies like the UK biobank, in which there are many people that develop disease due to different causes.