Approved research

Genetically elevated risk factors and chronic diseases: comparison and combination of associations in the China Kadoorie Biobank with those in UK Biobank

Lay summary

Cardiovascular disease, such as coronary heart disease and stroke, is a major health burden in both developed and emerging countries. Many genetic variants are known to produce lifelong differences in specific vascular risk factors such as blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. The project aims to compare the relative strengths and inter-relationships between such effects and cardiovascular disease within two large biobank populations with different patterns of cardiovascular disease. The findings will improve understanding of the causal relevance of different cardiovascular risk factors to the disease. This may lead to benefits to health through helping to inform lifestyle choices, health policies and the targeting of cardiovascular treatments. Many hundreds of genetic variants have now been robustly identified as associated with various vascular risk factors and will be used to form genetic risk scores for specific factors, separately within UK Biobank and within the China Kadoorie Biobank (which has 510K Chinese participants). The relationships of the scores to coronary disease, stroke and other cardiovascular traits in the two populations will be compared. Full cohort