Approved research

Genetic Determinants of Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Related Measures

Lay summary

Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), defined as ability of lungs and circulating blood to supply oxygen during sustained physical activity, is an important physiologic measure and a low CRF is associated with poor health outcomes. Previous studies showed that physical fitness tend to run in families but to date, it hasn't been determined which genetic variants are associated with CRF. Identifying regions in human genome that are associated with CRF can help us better understand the biology behind the differences of fitness levels among individuals as well as the poor health outcomes related to lower levels of CRF. This expected duration of this project is 2 years; including quality control stages for the genotype and phenotype data, preparing necessary data elements for analyses, conducting GWAS for cardiorespiratory fitness associated traits, performing genome-wide association meta-analyses for those traits using UK Biobank and eMERGE datasets, writing and publishing the manuscript for this project.