(P29-016-24) Circulating Lipids in an Older, Multiethnic Population: Self-Reported Subgroups as a Gateway to Precision Nutrition

Objectives: Circulating lipids provide a window into future as well as current health status; lipids reflect and are influenced by genetics, the microbiome, physiological status, and lifestyle choices, most notably, diet. Implementing precision nutrition requires an understanding of how these factors interact. Self-identified race and ethnicity groups (SIREG) are, at some level, social constructs, but at a population level, they associate with meaningful differences in lifestyle choices (e.g., diet), physiology (e.g., adiposity distribution), and health outcomes. Thus, SIREG are potentially informative natural subgroups, and their lipid characteristics are understudied.

Methods: The Multiethnic Cohort Study (MEC) has followed over 215,000 Hawaii and Los Angeles residents of African (AA), Japanese, European, Latino, and Native Hawaiian ancestry since 1993-1996. The MEC Adiposity Phenotype Study (MEC-APS) examined 1,861 healthy, non-smoking MEC participants aged 60-77 years in 2013-2016. Subjects underwent whole-body DXA and abdominal MRI scans, anthropometric measurements, fasting blood and stool collection, and a resting metabolism test, and completed a MEC FFQ. Plasma lipids ( >400 fatty acyls, glycerophospholipids, glycerolipids, sphingolipids, sacchrolipids, and cholesterol esters) were measured by a semi-quantitative, non-targeted LC-MS method.

Results: SIREG differed in distribution of lipids within a given lipid class by carbon chain length and saturation. Sex and SIREG were associated with both relative and absolute differences in both inter- and intra-class lipids (pvalues ~10^-5 to 10^-20). For example, AA women had generally lower levels of many lipids, but both AA women and Latinas showed elevation of FA18:1. However, no SIREG-linked changes were observed in FA 16:0. Sex-specific differences were also altered by SIREG.

Conclusions: SIREG provides an important and informative basis to set the stage for follow-up analysis to probe the mechanistic underpinnings of genetic and other factors (i.e. diet, lifestyle, physiological status) on blood lipids and their association with physiological status and future health. The deep phenotyping of the MEC-APS cohort provides a unique resource with which to approach personalized and precision diet.

Funding Sources: NIH/NCI, NIH/NHLBI, USDA