Dietary patterns, biomarkers reflecting various biological pathways and risk of type 2 diabetes in multiethnic cohorts

• Applicant: Dr. Simone Jacobs
• Subject Area: Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics ; Nutritional Sciences
• Term: from 2015 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279474085

The aim of this research project is to identify dietary patterns separately for the different ethnic groups of the 'Multiethnic Cohort' with an innovative statistical approach and to ethnic-specifically investigate the relation between these identified dietary patterns and risk of type 2 diabetes. Prevalence and incidence rates of type 2 diabetes were found to vary widely by ethnicity, e.g. in the multiethnic setting of Hawaii, considerably higher rates were found in Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders compared to whites residing in the United States. Besides genetic predisposition and prevalence of excess body weight, diet and lifestyle habits may add to this discrepancy. Regarding diet, instead of investigating the relation between individual nutrients or foods and disease risk, dietary pattern analyses have lately shifted into focus because they take intercorrelations and interaction among foods and nutrients into account. Therefore, dietary pattern analyses may provide more promising strategies for preventing and controlling diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, than single food or nutrient analyses. Three approaches of characterizing overall diet are commonly distinguished, a priori, a posteriori and a combination of both. A priori-defined indices evaluate dietary quality and are created based on dietary recommendations and existing scientific evidence for chronic diseases. A posteriori-derived dietary patterns on the other hand are identified through an exploratory data-driven approach. A combination of an a posteriori- and a priori-defined approach called reduced rank regression (RRR) might be more suitable to identify ethnic-specific dietary patterns predictive of type 2 diabetes. Only few studies have used this new methodological approach to generate dietary patterns and evaluated the association between the identified patterns and risk of type 2 diabetes so far, and none of these studies has identified ethnic-specific patterns. This study aims to identify dietary patterns with RRR with diabetes-related biomarkers reflecting different pathways (dyslipidemia, inflammation, and adiponectin mainly reflecting insulin-sensitizing effects) as response variables separately for Native Hawaiian, Japanese-American, white, Latino and African-American men and women of the 'Multiethnic Cohort'. The participants in the respective ethnic groups and gender will be characterized regarding their biomarker status and dietary intake across the identified pattern categories. Subsequently the associations between the identified ethnic-specific patterns and risk of type 2 diabetes will be investigated in the respective ethnic groups separately for men and women.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Netherlands, USA
• Hosts: Professorin Dr. Gertraud Maskarinec; Professorin Dr. Karien Stronks