Supervisors

John Perry, Ken Ong

Programme(s)

Early Life Aetiology and Mechanisms of Diabetes and Related Metabolic Disorders

Summary

The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DoHAD) hypothesis proposes that many diseases of old age, and other markers of biological ageing, are influenced by factors during early life. Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that traits such as low birth weight, childhood obesity or early puberty timing are associated with increased risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer, yet little is understood about the nature of these relationships.

Our group are one of the world leaders in identifying genetic determinants of these early life growth and reproductive traits^1-7. We have several projects available in both statistical genetics or traditional epidemiology to help interrogate large-scale population datasets to better understand how patterns of growth and reproductive ageing influence disease, what the underlying biological mechanisms are and how we might develop interventions to help prevent disease.

Selected References

1. Ruth et al, Genetic insights into biological mechanisms governing human ovarian ageing. Nature (2021)
2. Ruth et al, Using human genetics to understand the disease impacts of testosterone in men and women. Nature Medicine (2020)
3. Ganna et al, Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior. Science (2019)
4. Warrington et al, Maternal and fetal genetic effects on birth weight and their relevance to cardio-metabolic risk factors. Nature Genetics (2019)
5. Day et al, Genomic analyses identify hundreds of variants associated with age at menarche and support a role for puberty timing in cancer risk’. Nature Genetics (2017)
6. Horikoshi et al, Genome-wide associations for birth weight and correlation with adult disease. Nature (2016)
7. Day et al. Physical and neurobehavioral determinants of reproductive onset and success. Nature Genetics (2016)