Repositioning of the global epicentre of non-optimal cholesterol

High blood cholesterol is typically considered a feature of wealthy western countries1,2. However, dietary and behavioural determinants of blood cholesterol are changing rapidly throughout the world3 and countries are using lipid-lowering medications at varying rates. These changes can have distinct effects on the levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and non-HDL cholesterol, which have different effects on human health4,5. However, the trends of HDL and non-HDL cholesterol levels over time have not been previously reported in a global analysis. Here we pooled 1,127 population-based studies that measured blood lipids in 102.6 million individuals aged 18 years and older to estimate trends from 1980 to 2018 in mean total, non-HDL and HDL cholesterol levels for 200 countries. Globally, there was little change in total or non-HDL cholesterol from 1980 to 2018. This was a net effect of increases in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreases in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe. As a result, countries with the highest level of non-HDL cholesterol—which is a marker of cardiovascular risk—changed from those in western Europe such as Belgium, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Malta in 1980 to those in Asia and the Pacific, such as Tokelau, Malaysia, The Philippines and Thailand. In 2017, high non-HDL cholesterol was responsible for an estimated 3.9 million (95% credible interval 3.7 million–4.2 million) worldwide deaths, half of which occurred in east, southeast and south Asia. The global repositioning of lipid-related risk, with non-optimal cholesterol shifting from a distinct feature of high-income countries in northwestern Europe, north America and Australasia to one that affects countries in east and southeast Asia and Oceania should motivate the use of population-based policies and personal interventions to improve nutrition and enhance access to treatment throughout the world.</p

A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Repositioning of the global epicentre of non-optimal cholesterol

High blood cholesterol is typically considered a feature of wealthy western countries1,2. However, dietary and behavioural determinants of blood cholesterol are changing rapidly throughout the world3 and countries are using lipid-lowering medications at varying rates. These changes can have distinct effects on the levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and non-HDL cholesterol, which have different effects on human health4,5. However, the trends of HDL and non-HDL cholesterol levels over time have not been previously reported in a global analysis. Here we pooled 1,127 population-based studies that measured blood lipids in 102.6 million individuals aged 18 years and older to estimate trends from 1980 to 2018 in mean total, non-HDL and HDL cholesterol levels for 200 countries. Globally, there was little change in total or non-HDL cholesterol from 1980 to 2018. This was a net effect of increases in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreases in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe. As a result, countries with the highest level of non-HDL cholesterol�which is a marker of cardiovascular risk�changed from those in western Europe such as Belgium, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Malta in 1980 to those in Asia and the Pacific, such as Tokelau, Malaysia, The Philippines and Thailand. In 2017, high non-HDL cholesterol was responsible for an estimated 3.9 million (95 credible interval 3.7 million�4.2 million) worldwide deaths, half of which occurred in east, southeast and south Asia. The global repositioning of lipid-related risk, with non-optimal cholesterol shifting from a distinct feature of high-income countries in northwestern Europe, north America and Australasia to one that affects countries in east and southeast Asia and Oceania should motivate the use of population-based policies and personal interventions to improve nutrition and enhance access to treatment throughout the world. © 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

Structure, evolution and developmental expression of the silkmoth chorion multigene families

SYNOPSIS. The silkmoth eggshell (chorion) is a complex extracellular structure, with important physiological functions concerning survival of the developing embryo. The chorion proteins are encoded in several families of genes, generated during evolution by gene duplication and diversification. The gene families are highly regulated during development, so that more than 100 distinct chorion proteins are produced during specific stages in choriogenesis. Chorion genes are clustered in a single chromosome, and in the aggregate account for more than 350 kb of DNA. They have been cloned and their structure and organization have been studied by recombinant DNA techniques. I summarize the information currently available, and relate it to the processes of gene evolution and regulation of gene expression during development. © 1981 by the American Society of Zoologists

Nonuniform evolution of duplicated, developmentally controlled chorion genes in a silkmoth

We report the sequence of A/B.L1, a tightly linked pair of genes from the A and B chorion families in Bombyx mori. Comparison with the previously characterized A/B.L11 and A/B.L12 pairs from the same species reveals moderate sequence divergence, which is clearly nonuniform. Although the average divergence of A/B.L12 from the other two pairs is more than double that between A/B.L11 and A/B.L1, the ratio differs by more than 30-fold in different DNA regions. One domain of the A gene is highly divergent between A/B.L12 and A/B.L1 or A/B.L11, but essentially invariable in the latter two. In well-aligned DNA segments, nearly all mutated sites (111/112) show variants shared by two of the three sequences, in 42% of the cases between the more distantly related pairs (A/B.L12 and either A/B.L1 or A/B.L11). Eight of the variants shared by distantly related pairs are clustered within 51 bp, suggesting the possibility that they arose through sequence transfers between gene pairs, rather than being primitive or resulting from independent mutations. The short intergenic, putatively regulatory DNa of the developmentally middle A/B.L1 and A/B.L11 pairs resembles that of the late HcA/HcB pairs, particularly in patches that may correspond to cis-regulatory elements. © 1989, Springer-Verlag New York Inc. All rights reserved

Nonuniform evolution of duplicated, developmentally controlled chorion genes in a silkmoth

We report the sequence of A/B.L1, a tightly linked pair of genes from the A and B chorion families in Bombyx mori. Comparison with the previously characterized A/B.L11 and A/B.L12 pairs from the same species reveals moderate sequence divergence, which is clearly nonuniform. Although the average divergence of A/B.L12 from the other two pairs is more than double that between A/B.L11 and A/B.L1, the ratio differs by more than 30-fold in different DNA regions. One domain of the A gene is highly divergent between A/B.L12 and A/B.L1 or A/B.L11, but essentially invariable in the latter two. In well-aligned DNA segments, nearly all mutated sites (111/112) show variants shared by two of the three sequences, in 42% of the cases between the more distantly related pairs (A/B.L12 and either A/B.L1 or A/B.L11). Eight of the variants shared by distantly related pairs are clustered within 51 bp, suggesting the possibility that they arose through sequence transfers between gene pairs, rather than being primitive or resulting from independent mutations. The short intergenic, putatively regulatory DNa of the developmentally middle A/B.L1 and A/B.L11 pairs resembles that of the late HcA/HcB pairs, particularly in patches that may correspond to cis-regulatory elements. © 1989, Springer-Verlag New York Inc. All rights reserved