An increasing number of people are living with cardiometabolic diseases, such as diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke. Cardiometabolic multimorbidity is becoming a global health challenge. It is of great importance to identify risk factors and biomarkers for the prevention or delay of the onset and progression of cardiometabolic diseases. Although many studies have investigated the potential pathogenesis, environmental risk factors and biomarkers of cardiometabolic diseases, few studies have comprehensively examined the role of gene-environment interaction, mediation of metabolic markers, and interaction between multi-omics in the development of cardiometabolic diseases. Most previous studies focused on a single risk factor or one isolated metabolic pathway.
Therefore, the objectives of this project are:
(1) to systematically evaluate associations of environmental factors (lifestyle, dietary intake, medication, and environmental pollutants, etc.) and metabolic phenotypes (weight change, blood lipids, blood glucose, metabolomics, and proteomics, etc.) with the risk of cardiometabolic diseases.
(2) to investigate the interactions between genetics and environmental factors, and the role of gene-environment interaction in the incidence and progression of cardiometabolic diseases.
(3) to investigate the potential mediation effect of metabolic phenotypes between environmental factors, gene-environment interaction and cardiometabolic diseases.
(4) to improve the traditional prediction model of cardiometabolic disease, based on identification and validation of novel multi-omics biomarkers.
