0000000000254673

AUTHOR

Terho Lehtimaki

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities(.)(1,2) This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity(3-6). Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55% of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017-and more than 80% in some low- and middle-income regions…

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Do childhood infections affect labour market outcomes in adulthood and, if so, how?

A burgeoning body of literature suggests that poor childhood health leads to adverse health outcomes. lower educational attainment and weaker labour market outcomes in adulthood. We focus on an important but under-researched topic, which is the role played by infection-related hospitalization (IRH) in childhood and its links to labour market outcomes later in life. The participants aged 24-30 years in 2001 N =1706 were drawn from the Young Finns Study, which includes comprehensive registry data on IRHs in childhood at ages 0-18 years. These data are linked to longitudinal registry information on labour market outcomes (2001-2012) and parental background (1980). The estimations were performe…

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Height and body-mass index trajectories of school-aged children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019 in 200 countries and territories: a pooled analysis of 2181 population-based studies with 65 million participants

BACKGROUND: Comparable global data on health and nutrition of school-aged children and adolescents are scarce. We aimed to estimate age trajectories and time trends in mean height and mean body-mass index (BMI), which measures weight gain beyond what is expected from height gain, for school-aged children and adolescents.

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Nine Loci for Ocular Axial Length Identified through Genome-wide Association Studies, Including Shared Loci with Refractive Error

Refractive errors are common eye disorders of public health importance worldwide. Ocular axial length (AL) is the major determinant of refraction and thus of myopia and hyperopia. We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for AL, combining 12,531 Europeans and 8,216 Asians. We identified eight genome-wide significant loci for AL (RSPO1, C3orf26, LAMA2, GJD2, ZNRF3, CD55, MIP, and ALPPL2) and confirmed one previously reported AL locus (ZC3H11B). Of the nine loci, five (LAMA2, GJD2, CD55, ALPPL2, and ZC3H11B) were associated with refraction in 18 independent cohorts (n = 23,591). Differential gene expression was observed for these loci in minus-lens-induced myopia mouse …

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A century of trends in adult human height

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Trends in adult body-mass index in 200 countries from 1975 to 2014: a pooled analysis of 1698 population-based measurement studies with 19.2 million participants

Copyright © NCD Risk Factor Collaboration. Open Access article distributed under the terms of CC BY.

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Genome Analyses of >200,000 Individuals Identify 58 Loci for Chronic Inflammation and Highlight Pathways that Link Inflammation and Complex Disorders

International audience; C-reactive protein (CRP) is a sensitive biomarker of chronic low-grade inflammation and is associated with multiple complex diseases. The genetic determinants of chronic inflammation remain largely unknown, and the causal role of CRP in several clinical outcomes is debated. We performed two genome-wide association studies (GWASs), on HapMap and 1000 Genomes imputed data, of circulating amounts of CRP by using data from 88 studies comprising 204,402 European individuals. Additionally, we performed in silico functional analyses and Mendelian randomization analyses with several clinical outcomes. The GWAS meta-analyses of CRP revealed 58 distinct genetic loci (p < 5 × 1…

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Effects of diabetes definition on global surveillance of diabetes prevalence and diagnosis: a pooled analysis of 96 population-based studies with 331 288 participants.

Diabetes has been defined on the basis of different biomarkers, including fasting plasma glucose (FPG), 2-h plasma glucose in an oral glucose tolerance test (2hOGTT), and HbA1c. We assessed the effect of different diagnostic definitions on both the population prevalence of diabetes and the classification of previously undiagnosed individuals as having diabetes versus not having diabetes in a pooled analysis of data from population-based health examination surveys in different regions.

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