Andrea Ganna
@andganna.bsky.social
1.6K followers 680 following 190 posts
Associate Prof in health data science @HiLIFE_helsinki @FIMM_UH - MGH/Harvard - Playing with all kind of data - http://dsgelab.org
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Reposted by Andrea Ganna
patrickphillips.bsky.social
Very important paper for the geroscience hypothesis. Healthy aging is critical, even in the face of obvious disease states.
andganna.bsky.social
🧬💥 Do the genetics that make you develop a disease also help you survive it? Not much.

Our new study in Nature Genetics including 9 disease and 7 biobanks shows:

• Susceptibility variants ≠ survival
• PRSs for onset weak at predicting progression
• Lifespan PRS predicts survival better
andganna.bsky.social
A fantastic collaboration with
@finngen.bsky.social &
Finnish Clinical Biobank Tampere, led by Rodos Rodosthenous & Leena Viiri.

I personally learned a lot about running an RCT: we need to make them simpler!

@fimm-uh.bsky.social
@hilife-helsinki.bsky.social
andganna.bsky.social
Takeaway:

While genetics strongly predict body weight at baseline, they do not determine who benefits from dietary coaching. In other words, behavioral interventions can overcome genetic risk in non-diabetic overweight and mildly obese adults.
andganna.bsky.social
📊 Results:

✅ Excellent retention: 90% participants returned at 6 months (in both trial arms)
✅ Diet worked: intervention group lost ~5% body weight vs controls
❌ But… the effectiveness of the intervention did not differ between those with high vs. low genetic risk for higher BMI.
andganna.bsky.social
🧠 What makes GENEROOS unique?

👉 It’s the first prospective RCT to directly test this hypotesis (others did so retrospectively) and the first to recruit participants from the extreme tails (top & bottom 5%) of the BMI polygenic score.

223 non-diabetic adults (BMI 23–36 kg/m²) took part.
andganna.bsky.social
💥 New preprint & our first RCT! 💥

Does an extremely high or low BMI polygenic score influence weight loss after a diet intervention?

GENEROOS is a 6-month randomized diet vs. control trial testing if genetic predisposition to higher BMI affects weight loss in overweight adults
andganna.bsky.social
Thanks to the many biobanks involved!
And particularly Zhiyu Yang for leading this!
andganna.bsky.social
🧬💥 Do the genetics that make you develop a disease also help you survive it? Not much.

Our new study in Nature Genetics including 9 disease and 7 biobanks shows:

• Susceptibility variants ≠ survival
• PRSs for onset weak at predicting progression
• Lifespan PRS predicts survival better
andganna.bsky.social
comparing to one clinical prediction model is one way to think about this. the other is about the re-use of generated trajectories for multiple purposes in just one go: readmission rate, mortality, healthcare costs, disease risk and so on…
andganna.bsky.social
Thanks Michel! let’s chat. we want to have this pan-european.
andganna.bsky.social
One argument is that EHR are easily accessible why PRS are used only in research settings. so why bother if we can use already EHRs? showing that PRS provide complementary info makes them potentially useful. True especially for cancer where EHRs are very weak for disease prediction.
andganna.bsky.social
@detroiki.bsky.social and @tuomohartonen.bsky.social co-lead this project. We did it as part of INTERVENE. Thanks especially to Estonia Biobank colleagues! Always a pleasure to work together.

@fimm-uh.bsky.social
andganna.bsky.social
Check out @tuomohartonen.bsky.social blog post on our study, out today in Nature Genetics, comparing electronic health record-based risk scores with genetic polygenic scores, and how they work better together!

tuomohartonen.substack.com/p/medical-re...
andganna.bsky.social
Happy to see this online!

Having an extra sex chromosome really challenge the binary definition of sex based on XX and XY. So it is not only a medical, but also an important societal question.
andganna.bsky.social
Can you even access cosmos as university researcher?

I’m in general amazed how easy is to combine health data in US. It would impossible for a patient to opt out on the use of their data