Inflammation & health transitions – A population-level approach
In the following IMMEDIATE insights blog series, we will dive deeper into our observational cohorts. Solange Gonzalez Chiappe from the Max Delbrück Center gives an overview of the objectives of the IMMEDIATE Work Package 2 (WP2).
WP2 is focused on unravelling shared and non-shared inflammation signatures in the transition from health to disease in the domains of metabolic, cardiovascular, kidney and brain functions.
After identifying inflammation signatures predicting a 5-year worsening of these intermediary health markers for each domain; we will examine which parts of the identified signatures are shared across domains and which are domain-specific; the latter characterizing a general homeostasis loss.
Two prospective and national German cohorts and one Israeli cohort are being used to achieve these objectives:
- The German National Cohort (NAKO health study), or "NAKO" for short – is an ongoing large prospective cohort of more than 205,000 randomly selected citizens. Participants were aged 20 to 69 years at recruitment and underwent deep phenotyping during the baseline examinations between 2014 - 2019 as well as the first re-examination between 2019 - 2024.
- The KTX360° study, a multi-centre study conducted from 2018-2021 followed patients after kidney transplantation.
- The 10k project is an ongoing observational study designed to gather information on lifestyle and diseases in the Israeli population. Participants are aged between 40 and 70 years old.
These cohorts provide information on repeated clinical and biological measurements of different organ functions. For instance, for the IMMEDIATE project, we will investigate in about 2500 NAKO participants from the Berlin North study centre prospective changes in HbA1c, glomerular filtration rate, blood pressure, arterial stiffness and MRI-based brain function indicators (available for a subset) between the baseline examination and first re-examination approximately five years later.
In both NAKO and KTX, inflammation profiles based on the OLINK 96 inflammation panel (in KTX360° also by CyTOF cytometry in peripheral blood mononuclear cells) will be related to health-to-disease transition indicators.
Stay tuned for more insights as we continue our journey towards empowering individuals to manage their own health proactively.