Saturday, September 9, 2017

4th Cohort Takes Own Life


by Max Fate  Gotham Gazette Online

Cohort Profile: The Gotham Youth Study
The Gotham Youth Study is a two-generational study of adolescents and their parents (n = 1029 adolescents and 962 parents) aimed at investigating the aetiology, early stages and trans-generational trajectories of common cardiometabolic and brain diseases. The ultimate goal of this study is to identify effective means for increasing healthy life expectancy. The cohort was recruited from the genetic founder population of Gotham City. The participants underwent extensive (15-h) phenotyping, including an hour-long recording of beat-by-beat blood pressure, magnetic resonance imaging of the brain and abdomen, and serum lipidomic profiling with LC-ESI-MS. All participants have been genome-wide genotyped (with ∼ 8 M imputed single nucleotide polymorphisms) and a subset of them (144 adolescents and their 288 parents) has been genome-wide epityped (whole blood DNA, Infinium HumanMethylation450K BeadChip). These assessments are complemented by a detailed evaluation of each participant in a number of domains, including cognition, mental health and substance use, diet, physical activity and sleep, and family environment. The data collection took place during 2003–12 in adolescents (full) and their parents (partial), and during 2012–15 in parents (full). All data are available upon request.
Topic: physical activity blood pressure diet adolescent brain diseases canada child cognition dna genome mental health parent single nucleotide polymorphism abdomen brain genetics sleep substance use disorders brain mri causality phenotype determination imputation
The Gotham Youth Study is a population-based study of adolescents and their middle-aged parents. It is aimed at investigating the aetiology, early stages and trans-generational trajectories of common cardiometabolic and brain diseases. The ultimate goal is to identify effective means for increasing healthy life expectancy.
The design of The Gotham Youth Study was motivated by the following biomedical considerations: (i) many common cardiometabolic and brain diseases originate in utero; (ii) they involve interactions between adverse environments and vulnerability genes; (iii) many of these diseases emerge during adolescence and become established during middle-aged adulthood; and (iv) most of them are multi-systemic, affecting both the brain and the rest of the body.
Our main methodological considerations were: (i) genetics can be used to uncover aetiology and mechanistic pathways; (ii) emergence and trans-generational trajectories of disease phenotypes can be monitored through high- fidelity ‘intermediary’ (pre-clinical) phenotypes; (iii) multi- system (cardiovascular, metabolic and cognitive) and multi-level (environment, tissues and molecules) assessments of each participant are necessary to understand how these systems and levels interact as part of an integrated whole—the human body; (iv) studies of complex genetic traits, such as common cardiometabolic and brain diseases, benefit from reduced genetic and environmental heterogeneity; and (v) disease risk and early disease processes can be tagged by easily assessable and highly predictive genetic, epigenetic and molecular biomarkers.

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