Healthy Lifestyle, Metabolic Signature, and Risk of Cardiovascular Diseases: A Population-Based Study

• Published in: Nutrients 2024-10, Vol.16 (20), p.3553
• Main Authors: Wang, Yuhua, Tian, Fei, Qian, Zhengmin Min, Ran, Shanshan, Zhang, Jingyi, Wang, Chongjian, Chen, Lan, Zheng, Dashan, Vaughn, Michael G, Tabet, Maya, Lin, Hualiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Aged; Biobanks; Biomarkers; Body mass index; Cardiovascular disease; Cardiovascular diseases; Cardiovascular Diseases - epidemiology; Codes; Diabetes; Ethnicity; Exercise; Female; Health aspects; Health behavior; Health care; Healthy Lifestyle; Humans; Hypertension; Job requirements; Life style; Lifestyles; Male; Mendelian Randomization Analysis; Metabolic disorders; Metabolism; Metabolites; Metabolome; Middle Aged; Missing data; Mortality; NMR; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Prevention; Proportional Hazards Models; Questionnaires; Risk Factors; Self report; Stroke; United Kingdom - epidemiology
• ISSN: 2072-6643; 2072-6643
• DOI: 10.3390/nu16203553

Although healthy lifestyle has been linked with a reduced risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), the potential metabolic mechanism underlying this association remains unknown. We included 161,018 CVD-free participants from the UK Biobank. Elastic net regression was utilized to generate a healthy lifestyle-related metabolic signature. The Cox proportional hazards model was applied to investigate associations of lifestyle-related metabolic signature with incident CVDs, and mediation analysis was conducted to evaluate the potential mediating role of metabolic profile on the healthy lifestyle-CVD association. Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis was conducted to detect the causality. During 13 years of follow-up, 17,030 participants developed incident CVDs. A healthy lifestyle-related metabolic signature comprising 123 metabolites was established, and it was inversely associated with CVDs. The hazard ratio (HR) was 0.83 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.81, 0.84) for CVD, 0.83 (95% CI: 0.81, 0.84) for ischemic heart disease (IHD), 0.86 (95% CI: 0.83, 0.90) for stroke, 0.86 (95% CI: 0.82, 0.89) for myocardial infarction (MI), and 0.75 (95% CI: 0.72, 0.77) for heart failure (HF) per standard deviation increase in the metabolic signature. The metabolic signature accounted for 20% of the association between healthy lifestyle score and CVD. Moreover, MR showed a potential causal association between the metabolic signature and stroke. Our study revealed a potential link between a healthy lifestyle, metabolic signatures, and CVD. This connection suggests that identifying an individual's metabolic status and implementing lifestyle modifications may provide novel insights into the prevention of CVD.