Approved research

Mediators of the association between adiposity and cardiometabolic health

Lay summary

Obesity is a strong risk factor for stroke and heart disease. While preventing obesity is the ultimate goal, this is not always possible. As such, it is important to find ways of preventing the adverse health consequences of obesity. In this project, we will estimate how much of the ill-effects of obesity could be prevented if we intervened on intermediate processes such as blood pressure and lipid levels. The research will help efforts to prevent the adverse health consequences of obesity. I will do this by helping us to understand the potential benefits of intervening at different steps in the causal pathway from obesity to disease. We will use a technique called 'Mendelian Randomization', which uses genetic data to help us be sure that the effects we are seeing in the data are real and not due to other factors. We will include the full cohort in our analysis.