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Approved research

Social environments, genes and health

Principal Investigator: Dr Yi Li
Approved Research ID: 37491
Approval date: February 4th 2019

Lay summary

Health and health behavior such as obesity and smoking are attributable to both genes and social environments. The aim of this project is to investigate whether and how genes and social environments interactively influence health over life. For example, individuals with a certain genotype would be more likely to be obese if she or he is in lower social class compared to those who possess the same genotype in higher social class. This project aims to better understand whether and how the effects of environmental factors such as education on health depend on one's genotype. Public health interventions can benefit from such a gene-environment interaction study by identifying vulnerable groups in the population. The duration for the proposed project is 30 months.