Dr. Cathal Mc Crory

Summary

Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Programme

Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate

Summary

Funding Agency

National Institutes of health / Science Foundation Ireland

Programme

US-Ireland partnership award

Summary

A consistent finding in the epidemiological literature is that health is socially patterned. On average, individuals from more disadvantaged social backgrounds will develop diseases earlier and will die earlier compared with their more advantaged peers. So ubiquitous is the association between health and wealth that it has been referred to as a "fundamental" cause of disease. But what is it about low socio-economic status (SES) that makes a person growing up disadvantaged more likely to experience disease, to experience earlier onset of disease, and more likely to suffer premature mortality? Understanding how social group-based differences in SES become biologically embedded in the tissues and organs of the body over the life course is the focus of this project. We will develop a measure for estimating the impact of life course stresses on the body and explore the extent to which this construct explains differences in longevity between different SES groups. It is anticipated that this project will lead to the identification of modifiable risk and resilience factors that contribute to accelerated ageing and will help inform societal approaches to reduce health inequalities and promote healthy ageing.

Funding Agency

Health Research Board

Programme

Emerging Investigator Award

Person Months

48

Summary

Provides the survey and administrative infrastructure for waves 5-6 of the TILDA study

Funding Agency

Health Research Board

Programme

Core funding

Summary

The proposed WGS investment will be layered upon and leverage complementary `omic datasets in TILDA. A primary aim of TILDA is to identify the biological and environmental factors that contribute to trajectories of ageing and chronic disease development over time. `Omic datasets generated to date in TILDA include epigenetics (n=950, Illumina EPIC v1 850K DNA methylation platform), telomeres (n=5400, Leukocyte Telomere Length, using monochrome multiplex quantitative PCR, Cawthon et al, 20091), metabolomics (n=1400, >700 metabolites generated by reverse phase chromatography, proteomics (n=4960, 26 biomarkers, 9 clinically measured and 17 measured on MSD V-Plex and UPlex enzyme-linked immunosorbent multiplex assays), micronutrients (n=4900, five vitamin and antioxidant biomarkers measured by LC-MS/MS or HPLC), hormones (n=2500, five stress and sex hormones measured by HPLC-MS), SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (n=3500, antibodies against five SARS-Cov-2 antigens and four seasonal coronavirus antigens measured by a Luminex bead-based multiplex Luciferase-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay) and viral exposure histories (n=540, >9,000 epitopes from all known human viruses using CDI VirScan Phage ImmunoPrecipitation Sequencing (PhIP-Seq) platform). We will WGS 700 individuals, focusing on the overlap between the methylation, telomere and proteomic platforms (n=916). 588 of these samples also overlap with the metabolomic dataset. CRT investment will build on this foundation, with the WGS data informing on the underlying genetic architecture of ageing, how architecture interacts with lifestyle and environmental exposures throughout the life-course, ultimately influencing biological ageing in Ireland.

Funding Agency

SFI

Programme

Centre for Research Training - Data Generation Fund

Project Type

Genomics