Assessing Inherited Markers of Metabolic Syndrome in the Young

The AIMM Young study is a collaboration between Children's National Medical Center (CNMC) and colleges/universities nationwide--currently including Howard University (HU), East Carolina University (ECU), and University of Massachusetts, Amherst (U Mass). This study obtains a variety of baseline measures (such as serum biomarkers related to metabolic syndrome, anthropometrics, muscle strength, and fitness testing) along with genetic information from healthy college-age (18-35 years) young adults in efforts to identify phenotype-genotype associations that may predispose individuals to developing metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and/or related diseases such as obesity.

We hypothesized that certain genetic variations will be protective against metabolic syndrome, while others will show a strong correlation with specific components of metabolic syndrome disease. We expect that the study of "pre-symptomatic," young individuals will facilitate the identification of genetic risk loci for metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. Younger populations typically have less confounding variables, and this facilitates normalizing of metabolic syndrome features and environment/lifestyle. Additionally, young subjects can provide more robust longitudinal data, and be recruited into subsequent interventions to reverse the trend towards metabolic syndrome, rather than the more difficult task of reversing type 2 diabetes in older populations. The data collected will be stratified according to gender, age, ethnicity, genotype, and other phenotypic measures to determine how these factors influence disease risk.