MRC INTEGRATIVE EPIDEMIOLOGY UNIT (IEU)
SEMINAR SERIES

 SPECIAL SEMINAR

 Thursday, 23rd June, 2016

16.00 – 17.00 - Room OS6 – Oakfield House

Talk from the NEO Study; Ruifang Li, Dennis Mook and Ko Willems

Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Leiden University Medical Centre, Netherlands

 

 

Abstract

The last two decades have been characterized by a dramatic increase in overweight and obesity due to sedentary lifestyle and overnutrition. The obesity-related diseases will become striking burdens to the public health in the near future. In order to shed light on the pathways that lead to obesity-related diseases, a population-based cohort study --- The Netherlands Epidemiology of Obesity Study (NEO) was initiated since 2008. In total, 6,671 individuals aged between 45 and 65 years with a self-reported BMI of 27 kg/ m 2 or higher living in the greater area of Leiden (in the west of the Netherlands) were eligible to participate in the NEO study. At baseline, extensive examinations were undertaken, including anthropometry, electrocardiography, spirometry, and measurement of the carotid artery intima-media thickness by ultrasonography. In addition, blood and urine samples were collected both in the fasting and postprandial (after a standardised liquid meal) states, which made it possible to investigate the effects under different nutritional status. For both statuses, a selected subset of NEO samples (n=533) was measured 163 metabolites on the Biocrates platform. Meanwhile, all the NEO blood samples are going to finish the metabolite measurements on the Brainshake platform. Every NEO individual was genotyped on the Illumina HumanCoreExome Chip. In 2014, NEO study started the first follow-up through medical record linkage which ended in the March of 2016 with a median follow-up of two years. Abundant research is ongoing in the NEO study, and NEO study might substantially contribute to the obesity-related epidemiological research.

Biography

Ruifang Li

Ruifang Li is currently reading for a PhD in the department of Clinical Epidemiology in Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), supervised by Prof. Frits Rosendaal, Dr Astrid van Hylckama Vlieg and Dr Dennis.O. Mook-Kanamori. Her major research focus is on untangling the metabolic and genetic basis of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. She is performing metabolomics studies and genome-wide association analyses on postprandial metabolite concentrations in the Netherlands Epidemiology of Obesity (NEO) study.

Originally trained as a computer scientist in Beijing, China (BSc), Ruifang pursued her Master’s degree in Leiden University, the Netherlands, between 2008 and 2010, track in bioinformatics. After the study, she worked as a research assistant in the area of chemoinformatics from 2010 till 2013 at Bonn University, Germany, and mainly involved in developing tools to quantify compound structural similarity. Between 2013 and 2014, she shortly worked as a research assistant in the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and had a flavour of neuroscience research by analysing functional MRI data. From April of 2014, she started her PhD in Leiden in the area of genetic epidemiology.

Ko Willems van Dijk

Ko Willems van Dijk (1963) studied Molecular Sciences, specializing in Biotechnology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. After his graduation in 1988 (with honors), he obtained a Ph.D. from the department of Pathology of the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, in 1992 on a thesis entitled “Chromosomal organization of the human VH locus and mapping of VH gene segments comprising the developmentally expressed repertoire”. In 1992, he started as a postdoc in the department of Human Genetics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands on a project to develop novel mouse models to study lipoprotein metabolism and atherosclerosis. In 2001 he was appointed as associate Professor both in the departments of Human Genetics and General Internal Medicine at the Leiden University Medical Center. His interests focused on the interaction between lipoprotein and carbohydrate metabolism in the development of type 2 diabetes and atherosclerosis using both mouse models and human subjects. Since 2012 he is full professor in Genetics and Systems Biology of the Metabolic Syndrome at the departments of Human Genetics and Medicine, division Endocrinology. In addition to studies in mouse models and human subjects that are focused on specific genes and pathways, a major aim of his work is to gain insight in the systems biology of health and disease. Towards this end, various large scale (omics) measurements are being integrated and advanced mathematical approaches are being developed to investigate affected pathways in so-called genome scale metabolic models. This approach is being developed for both dedicated interventions in relatively small studies as well as large epidemiological cohorts.

Dennis Mook

Most of Dr. Dennis Mook-Kanamori’s research focuses on genetic and environmental markers of complex traits. During his PhD, he worked on numerous genome-wide association studies of early growth phenotypes, such as birth weight, head circumference and paediatric obesity. Also, he examined important environmental factors in early growth such as smoking, dietary intake and breastfeeding and their possible interaction with genes. Recently, he has been working on metabolomics of type 2 diabetes and obesity. Since 2013, he has been working at the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Primary Care at the Leiden University Medical Centre. In 2013, he received an ZonMW Veni personal grant (250k euro) to perform research in the field of metabolomics in the NEO (Netherlands Epidemiology of Obesity) Study. He co-supervises two PhD students, Ruifang Li and Tahani Alshehri. Besides his work as a researcher, he works part-time as a family practice physician in the area of Leiden/The Hague.