Major risk factors for Cardiovascular Disease

The proposal is to investigate the impact of lifestyle factors, including smoking, alcohol consumption and adiposity, each of which can affect many different diseases, on health outcomes (with a specific focus on CVD ). The focus will be on baseline questionnaire data, resurvey questionnaire data, and bio-sample analyses. Smoking and adiposity are the two most important determinants of premature mortality in the UK, and the potential protective effects of low-to-moderate alcohol consumption are still subject to debate. The size and detail of the UKB allows definitive analyses of these lifestyle factors.
UKB data will allow us to analyse more reliably than has been previously possible the changing effects in the UK of adiposity and smoking, and particularly the effects of smoking cessation at different ages. The co-applicants have a wide range of experience in studies of smoking, of adiposity and of alcohol both in the UK and in many other populations around the world. All analysis will be undertaken by well-trained statisticians and epidemiologists within NDPH. Baseline cross-sectional associations between exposures of interest (alcohol, adiposity and smoking) will first be described, followed by further analyses of risk factor associations with disease outcomes. Genetic data will also allow us to describe lifelong disease risk associated with each risk factor, to infer causation, and to explore possible biological mechanisms underlying the revealed associations. The full cohort, however subgroups of the population (i.e. different ethnicities) will be investigated separately in some analyses.