Young Women as Smokers and Nonsmokers: A Qualitative Social Identity Approach

A social identity perspective was used to explore young women's perceptions of smoking. Thirteen focus groups and 6 intercept interviews with women aged 16-28 years old were carried out in regards to the social identities that may influence young women’s smoking behavior. Three identities emerged: the "cool smoker" applied to the initiation of smoking; "considerate" smokers, who were older addicted smokers; and the actual and anticipated "good mother" identity which applied to young women who quit smoking during pregnancy. These identities add to our understanding of the meaning of smoking within the lives of young women and may allow more focused initiatives with this group to prevent the progression to regular addicted smoking

Large-scale exome array summary statistics resources for glycemic traits to aid effector gene prioritization

Copyright: \ua9 2023 Willems SM et al. Background: Genome-wide association studies for glycemic traits have identified hundreds of loci associated with these biomarkers of glucose homeostasis. Despite this success, the challenge remains to link variant associations to genes, and underlying biological pathways. Methods: To identify coding variant associations which may pinpoint effector genes at both novel and previously established genome-wide association loci, we performed meta-analyses of exome-array studies for four glycemic traits: glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c, up to 144,060 participants), fasting glucose (FG, up to 129,665 participants), fasting insulin (FI, up to 104,140) and 2hr glucose post-oral glucose challenge (2hGlu, up to 57,878). In addition, we performed network and pathway analyses. Results: Single-variant and gene-based association analyses identified coding variant associations at more than 60 genes, which when combined with other datasets may be useful to nominate effector genes. Network and pathway analyses identified pathways related to insulin secretion, zinc transport and fatty acid metabolism. HbA1c associations were strongly enriched in pathways related to blood cell biology. Conclusions: Our results provided novel glycemic trait associations and highlighted pathways implicated in glycemic regulation. Exome-array summary statistic results are being made available to the scientific community to enable further discoveries

Tissue-Specific Alteration of Metabolic Pathways Influences Glycemic Regulation

bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/790618; this version posted October 3, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license.Metabolic dysregulation in multiple tissues influences risk for type 2 diabetes (T2D). To identify pathways and tissues influencing T2D-relevant glycemic traits we investigated associations of exome-array variants in up to 144,060 nondiabetic individuals of multiple ancestries. Single-variant analyses identified 21 novel coding variant associations (18 loci), whilst gene-based tests revealed novel signals at TF (HbA1c) and G6PC [(Fasting Glucose (FG), Fasting Insulin (FI)]. Pathway and tissue enrichment analyses of trait-associated transcripts confirmed the importance of liver and kidney for FI and islets for FG, implicated adipose tissue in FI and gut in 2hGlu, and a role for the non-endocrine pancreas in glucose homeostasis. Functional studies demonstrated that the liver-enriched G6PC and the islet-specific G6PC2 were driven by multiple rare variants, with G6PC2 including two alleles within the same codon with divergent effects on glucose levels. Our findings highlight the value of integrating genomic and functional data to maximize biological inference