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Approved Research

The effect of genetic and environmental factors, and their interaction on prevalent and incident cardiometabolic disease.

Principal Investigator: Mr Zekai Chen
Approved Research ID: 76627
Approval date: October 19th 2021

Lay summary

As the most important cardiometabolic diseases, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) are leading causes of mortality and disability worldwide. Cardiometabolic diseases are multifactorial diseases with complex inheritance, determined by large numbers of genes, multiple environmental factors and their interaction. Substantial efforts have been put into the identification and modification of risk factors leading to cardiometabolic disease. But there is still a big gap waiting to be filled. For example, much remains unknown about the extent to which CVD and T2DM cluster in families and the way the interplay between genetic predisposition and environmental factors (i.e., gene-environment interaction) shapes risk of cardiometabolic disease. The genome-wide association study (GWAS) approach has greatly facilitated the development of identifying genetic loci and biological pathways. Therefore, we aim to investigate whether we can identify new genetic risk loci, and/or replicate previously identified risk loci for cardiometabolic disease/trait. Furthermore, we will investigate the effect of genetic and environmental factors, and their interaction on prevalent and incident cardiometabolic disease. We hope that this research leads to a better understanding of the biology underlying cardiometabolic disease/trait as well as the interplay between genetic factors and environmental factors. We also hope that this research may guide clinical decision-making with regards to cardiometabolic diseases diagnosis and prevention and guide optimization of behavioral changes to improve health and improve the prognostication of cardiometabolic disease.