Applied nutritional investigationNutritional habits, lifestyle, and genetic predisposition in cardiovascular and metabolic traits in Turkish population

- We investigated diet, lifestyle, and genetics in relation to cardiometabolic traits.
- We identified correlations between dietary habits and cardiometabolic traits.
- Genetic factors contributed to cardiometabolic disease also through the pleiotropy.
- Some genetic associations are indirect due to traits causative relationships.
- We applied a novel approach to dissect the cardiometabolic interactive processes.

ObjectivesCardiovascular and metabolic traits (CMT) are influenced by complex interactive processes including diet, lifestyle, and genetic predisposition. The present study investigated the interactions of these risk factors in relation to CMTs in the Turkish population.MethodsWe applied bootstrap agglomerative hierarchical clustering and Bayesian network learning algorithms to identify the causative relationships among genes involved in different biological mechanisms (i.e., lipid metabolism, hormone metabolism, cellular detoxification, aging, and energy metabolism), lifestyle (i.e., physical activity, smoking behavior, and metropolitan residency), anthropometric traits (i.e., body mass index, body fat ratio, and waist-to-hip ratio), and dietary habits (i.e., daily intakes of macro- and micronutrients) in relation to CMTs (i.e., health conditions and blood parameters).ResultsWe identified significant correlations between dietary habits (soybean and vitamin B12 intakes) and different cardiometabolic diseases that were confirmed by the Bayesian network-learning algorithm. Genetic factors contributed to these disease risks also through the pleiotropy of some genetic variants (i.e., F5 rs6025 and MTR rs180508). However, we also observed that certain genetic associations are indirect since they are due to the causative relationships among the CMTs (e.g., APOC3 rs5128 is associated with low-density lipoproteins cholesterol and, by extension, total cholesterol).ConclusionsOur study applied a novel approach to integrate various sources of information and dissect the complex interactive processes related to CMTs. Our data indicated that complex causative networks are present: causative relationships exist among CMTs and are affected by genetic factors (with pleiotropic and non-pleiotropic effects) and dietary habits.