Approved Research

Impact of genotype and environmental factors in the relationship between frailty and chronic-degenerative diseases in older people

Lay summary

The aim of this project is to investigate how genotype and environmental factors can interact with the presence of frailty defined using different definitions and how these factors can explain the association between frailty with the most common non-communicable chronic diseases.  

We will undertake this research using anonymous data. The project will last 36 months and we will publish several papers regarding, present our findings at conferences and provide lay summaries for patients.

We believe that our data can be of high public health importance, since non-communicable chronic diseases are the most common causes of death and disabiblity in the world. To understand if genotype and environmental factors are associated with a higher presence of frailty and how these conditions can increase the risk of risk of non-communicable chronic diseases is very important, in order to suggest these interventions as prevention for these epidemiologically relevant conditions.

In this sense, the  UK  Biobank  represents a longitudinal study with more than 500,000 people involved not only with clinical and functional data, but also with genotype analysis that can allow to better explore the genotype/environment  fragility interaction in increasing the risk of chronic diseases in older people: this study, therefore, can give important indications not only regarding frailty as possible risk factor for non-communicable chronic diseases , but also regarding the weight of envirommental and genetic factors.