Over the last years, Dr. Merino, conducted the proposed work to address the main research objectives, dissemination, and outreach activities detailed in the research application. The management and monitoring of the project has been carried in a very efficient-manner to ensure that the project is not delayed.
For the work proposed in Aim 1, we have provided evidence that genetically-driven hyperglycemia raises the risk of coronary artery disease, and this increased risk seems to be separate from the risk conferred by type 2 diabetes as a whole. We replicated findings among participants from the Framingham Heart Study. This work led to a pivotal publication in Diabetes Care, the 2017 Rachmiel Levine-Arthur Riggs Young Investigator Scientific Achievement Award.
For the work proposed in Aim 2 and Aim 3, a manuscript was accepted for publication in Diabetes. In this study we included 3,000 participants from the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) and showed that an intensive lifestyle intervention improves cardiometabolic risk factors regardless of genetic risk. These results support that a lifestyle interventions can be employed to reduce the burden of metabolic diseases across the full spectrum of genetic susceptibility.
Aim 4 was designed to expand findings from the DPP. To address this question, Dr. Merino leveraged his epidemiological skills and led a highly innovative project to investigate whether dietary quality interacts with a genetic susceptibility on the risk of diabetes. In this study, including genetic and dietary information from more 105,000 individuals with a median follow up of 12 years, he and his team showed that both genetic predisposition and dietary fat quality increase the risk of type 2 diabetes without evidence of significant interactions. The relevance of this study was that, for the first time, reliable data on the interplay between genetics and diet quality suggested that both genetics and diet quality are associated with the risk of the disease. Findings from this study were published in The British Medical Journal, were presented at several national and international conferences, and are the foundation for some of the most recent presentations he gave at invited symposiums, seminars, and general divulgation talks.
Finally, a new line of research has emerged from the proposed Aim 5 to accommodate the need to provide mechanistic insights from variants interacting with lifestyle components. We conducted a genome-wide association study in ~300,000 participants and identified 26 genomic regions associated with the preference for carbohydrate, protein, or fat. Identified signals map to different brain tissues and are enriched for genes expressed in specific neuronal populations. Findings were presented at national and international meetings and divulgated to the general population.
As part of networking and dissemination activities, Dr. Merino has continued making available his research through social-media platforms such as Twitter. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Dr. Merino’s participated in the researcher’s night and is member of the North America Chapter of the Marie Curie Alumni Association.
