Associations of maternal iron intake and hemoglobin in pregnancy with offspring vascular phenotypes and adiposity at age 10: findings from the avon longitudinal study of parents and children.

Iron deficiency is common during pregnancy. Experimental animal studies suggest that it increases cardiovascular risk in the offspring

Genomics and metabolomics of muscular mass in a community-based sample of UK females

The contribution of specific molecular-genetic factors to muscle mass variation and sarcopenia remains largely unknown. To identify endogenous molecules and specific genetic factors associated with appendicular lean mass (APLM) in the general population, cross-sectional data from the TwinsUK Adult Twin Registry were used. Non-targeted mass spec-based metabolomic profiling was performed on plasma of 3953 females (mostly dizygotic and monozygotic twins). APLM was measured using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) and genotyping was genome-wide (GWAS). Specific metabolites were used as intermediate phenotypes in the identification of single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with APLM using GWAS. In all, 162 metabolites were found significantly correlated with APLM, and explained 17.4% of its variation. However, the top three of them (unidentified substance X12063, urate, and mannose) explained 11.1% (P≤9.25 × 10(−26)) so each was subjected to GWAS. Each metabolite showed highly significant (P≤9.28 × 10(−46)) associations with genetic variants in the corresponding genomic regions. Mendelian randomization using these SNPs found no evidence for a direct causal effect of these metabolites on APLM. However, using a new software platform for bivariate analysis we showed that shared genetic factors contribute significantly (P≤4.31 × 10(−43)) to variance in both the metabolites and APLM – independent of the effect of the associated SNPs. There are several metabolites, having a clear pattern of genetic inheritance, which are highly significantly associated with APLM and may provide a cheap and readily accessible biomarker of muscle mass. However, the mechanism by which the genetic factor influences muscle mass remains to be discovered