Publications by authors named "Alexandra M Lewin"
Article Synopsis
- Early childhood growth patterns are linked to health in adulthood, but the genetic influences and developmental stages remain unclear.
- This study uses genome-wide association studies and various analyses to explore how genetics of early growth relate to adult health, finding significant connections between child and adult body mass index (BMI).
- The research also reveals distinct genetic factors influencing peak BMI during infancy, implying different strategies may be needed for addressing childhood obesity in prevention efforts.
Article Synopsis
- * Our method calculated averaged principal components (AvPCs) that represent body shape, with the first four AvPCs accounting for over 99% of the variability and showing heritability linked to cardiometabolic outcomes.
- * We conducted genome-wide association studies across 65 studies and identified six new genetic loci associated with different AvPCs, emphasizing that analyzing multiple traits can uncover complex genetic factors that single-trait analyses might miss.
Article Synopsis
- A meta-analysis was conducted on genome-wide studies to explore the genetics of childhood body mass index (BMI), involving nearly 47,000 children.
- The study identified 15 significant genetic loci related to BMI, with 12 being previously linked to adult BMI, plus three new loci that may indicate differences in how genetics influence BMI at different ages.
- A genetic risk score combining all these loci showed that additional risk alleles were associated with an increase in childhood BMI, explaining 2% of the variance, thereby suggesting a shared genetic basis for BMI in children and adults.
The genetic sequence variation of people from the Indian subcontinent who comprise one-quarter of the world's population, is not well described. We carried out whole genome sequencing of 168 South Asians, along with whole-exome sequencing of 147 South Asians to provide deeper characterisation of coding regions. We identify 12,962,155 autosomal sequence variants, including 2,946,861 new SNPs and 312,738 novel indels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent studies have highlighted the importance of assessing the robustness of putative biomarkers identified from experimental data. This has given rise to the concept of stable biomarkers, which are ones that are consistently identified regardless of small perturbations to the data. Since stability is not by itself a useful objective, we present a number of strategies that combine assessments of stability and predictive performance in order to identify biomarkers that are both robust and diagnostically useful.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Human T lymphotropic virus Type 1 (HTLV-1) causes a chronic inflammatory disease of the central nervous system known as HTLV-1-associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis (HAM) which resembles chronic spinal forms of multiple sclerosis (MS). The pathogenesis of HAM remains uncertain. To aid in the differential diagnosis of HAM and to identify pathogenetic mechanisms, we analysed the plasma proteome in asymptomatic HTLV-1 carriers (ACs), patients with HAM, uninfected controls, and patients with MS.
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