Discovery of novel causal genes shared between Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular disease

Discovery of novel causal genes shared between Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular disease - UK DRI Biobank Webinar
Dr Abbas Deghan (UK DRI at Imperial)

Speaker bio
Abbas Dehghan MD PhD FESCis a medical doctor and an epidemiologist. In 2016, he joined the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Imperial College London as a reader in cardiometabolic disorders. Since January 2020, Dr Dehghan is the director of postgraduate research at the school of public health. Dr Dehghan is a member of the steering committee of the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium and has led or been involved in many genome-wide association (GWAS) studies. Dr Dehghan is working on the genetics of omics, in particular metabolomics, and applying Mendelian Randomisation approach to investigate causal determinants of complex traits and diseases including cardiometabolic disorders, dementia and cancers.

About Biobank webinar
This talk was part of a special webinar from the UK Dementia Research Institute exploring opportunities to harness the UK Biobank's data resources for dementia research. In the session, speakers discussed how the resource was designed, how it can be accessed and exciting ways that it is being developed to increase its future utility.

The webinar was chaired by Prof Paul Matthews (Centre Director, UK DRI at Imperial) and Prof Ioanna Tzoulaki (Imperial College London).

Links to all the talks from the sessions can be found below:

About UK Biobank
UK Biobank is a 500,000-person prospective longitudinal population-based resource harbouring health records, genetic information and a wealth of fluid biomarker and imaging data, as well as measures of physical health, cognitive and sensory functions. It is uniquely rich amongst open, large population data resources for the extent of the subject phenotyping, which includes in depth, research quality multi-organ clinical imaging currently on more than 60,000 participants

Currently, participants are ~46-85 years old with 15 years follow-up. The numbers of incident dementias in the cohort are rising rapidly from ~5000 in 2020 to 14,000 expected by 2030. Thus, UK Biobank ‘Big Data’ is a prime resource for dementia research, especially to understand risk factors, early disease stages and progression.