Unravel Lifestyle-Cardiometabolic Disease Connections Using Multi-Omics Data in Large Biobank Studies of Diverse Populations

Cardiometabolic disease (CMD) remains the leading cause of global mortality, contributing to a heavy burden on healthcare systems. It is well accepted that lifestyle factors, such as poor diet, physical inactivity, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption, are important contributors to CMD incidence and mortality but underlying biological mechanisms linking lifestyle factors with cardiometabolic health are largely unknown. Research on such mechanisms may uncover novel biomarkers that more accurately predict disease onset, progression, and response to lifestyle interventions. 

The China Kadoorie Biobank study (CKB) is a large prospective cohort study with >0.5 million Chinese adults from 10 different locations in China (www.ckbiobank.org). Over the past 20 years, CKB has accumulated multi-dimensional data on lifestyle and other exposures, physical and other measurements (e.g. adiposity, blood pressure, liver steatosis and fibrosis, ECG, carotid artery intima media thickness and plaque, bone mineral density, and retinal images), incidence and mortality of major diseases including CMD, as well as multi-omics data including genomics (GWAS genotyping as well as WGS), proteomics (>10,000 proteins from Olink and Somalogic), metabolomics (>220 NMR and >5400 Metabolon metabolites, which cover 8 super biological pathways, e.g. amino acid metabolism, nucleotide metabolism, and microbiome metabolism, and 70 major pathways) and gut/oral metagenomics (shotgun sequencing). This large and rich resource will enable us to investigate the potential relevance of different lifestyle factors, as well as their interplay, for a range of cardiometabolic health conditions. Findings from CKB could be compared with those from the UK Biobank, which is an open resource for global researchers.