Recent Publication
Dr. Hassan Dashti, Instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital received a BNORC Pilot and Feasibility award in 2021 for his project entitled “Phenome-wide interactions between obesity genetic risk and lifestyle traits in an electronic health record biobank”. The project has resulted in a 2022 publication in BMC Medicine. Among patients in a clinical biobank, the investigators found that a favorable composite lifestyle (including adequate sleep, no smoking, moderate alcohol) attenuated risk for higher BMI conferred by common obesity genetic variants. In addition, in phenome-wide analyses, the investigators identified robust associations between a BMI polygenic risk score and 40 clinical diagnoses, including obesity, sleep apnea, nutritional deficiencies, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes, providing an updated atlas of diseases associated with obesity genetic risk.