Early-life exposures and cardiovascular disease risk among Ghanaian migrant and home populations: the RODAM study
Boateng, Daniel; Danquah, Ina; Said-Mohamed, Rihlat; Smeeth, Liam; Nicolaou, Mary; Meeks, Karlijn; Beune, Erik; Addo, Juliet; Bahendeka, Silver; Agyei-Baffour, Peter; Mockenhaupt, Frank P; Spranger, Joachim; Schulze, Matthias B; Grobbee, Diederick E; Agyemang, Charles; Klipstein-Grobusch, Kerstin
(2020) Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, volume 11, issue 3, pp. 250 - 263
(Article)
Abstract
Early-life environmental and nutritional exposures are considered to contribute to the differences in cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden. Among sub-Saharan African populations, the association between markers of early-life exposures such as leg length and sitting height and CVD risk is yet to be investigated. This study assessed the association between leg
... read more
length, sitting height, and estimated 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk among Ghanaian-born populations in Europe and Ghana. We constructed sex-specific quintiles for sitting height and leg length for 3250 participants aged 40-70 years (mean age 52 years; men 39.6%; women 60.4%) in the cross-sectional multicenter Research on Diabetes and Obesity among African Migrants study. Ten-year risk of ASCVD was estimated using the Pooled Cohort Equations; risk ≥7.5% was defined as "elevated" CVD risk. Prevalence ratios (PR) were estimated to determine the associations between sitting height, leg length, and estimated 10-year ASCVD risk. For both men and women, mean sitting height and leg length were highest in Europe and lowest in rural Ghana. Sitting height was inversely associated with 10-year ASCVD risk among all women (PR for 1 standard deviation increase of sitting height: 0.75; 95% confidence interval: 0.67, 0.85). Among men, an inverse association between sitting height and 10-year ASCVD risk was significant on adjustment for study site, adult, and parental education but attenuated when further adjusted for height. No association was found between leg length and estimated 10-year ASCVD risk. Early-life and childhood exposures that influence sitting height could be the important determinants of ASCVD risk in this adult population.
show less
Download/Full Text
Keywords: cardiovascular disease risk, Ghanaians, Leg length, Pooled Cohort Equation, sitting height, Medicine (miscellaneous), Journal Article
ISSN: 2040-1744
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Note: Funding Information: The RODAM study was supported by the European Commission under the Framework Programme (Grant Number: 278901). DB was supported by the Global Health Scholarship Programme, University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands. KM was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health in the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health (CRGGH). The CRGGH was supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the Center for Information Technology, and the Office of the Director at the National Institutes of Health (1ZIAHG200362). Publisher Copyright: © Cambridge University Press and the International Society for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease 2019.
(Peer reviewed)