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Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology

Giuseppe Giordano’s group

Our research

Unhealthy lifestyles underpin much of the burden of cardiometabolic disease affecting contemporary societies. In general, diet and exercise therapies that focus on weight loss substantially lower disease risk, and may slow disease progression. However, clinicians and patients often think drug therapy is an inevitable course of action. This is, in part, true if you consider that some patients respond poorly to lifestyle changes, no matter how hard they try. Further, unpredictable responses to beneficial lifestyle changes could be caused by advice being given in a generic fashion. 

The Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology (GAME) research group is striving to understand how individual biology impacts the results of lifestyle changes. There may be tremendous untapped potential to improve patient care by personalizing diet and exercise recommendations. This approach is often referred to as ‘precision medicine’. For example, we are currently investigating why and how certain individuals can lose more weight through a healthy diet, and even keep off excess weight for longer, than others, based purely on their genetic differences.

Aims

Our overarching research aim is to discover and optimise measurable biomarkers that can be used to stratify patient populations into subgroups that can be treated more effectively with targeted lifestyle therapies, at lesser cost, and with fewer adverse events than conventional approaches allow. Three integrated components to our research programme are utilised to achieve this aim.

  • Epidemiology: observational studies 
  • Functional genomics: ex vivo, lab-based experiments 
  • Randomized controlled trials: lifestyle intervention studies, focused on determining the clinical relevance of gene-lifestyle interaction effects in specially designed genotype-based recall trials

Impact

The unit is focused predominantly on characterizing the joint effects of lifestyle and genomic variation in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Under the umbrella of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), we are generating new data and knowledge to facilitate tailored lifestyle and drug therapies, for the prevention and treatment of complex cardiometabolic diseases. We hope that our work will ultimately improve treatment effectiveness, reduce costs and unnecessary side effects, and improve patient adherence. 

Research output

Link to a list of research output by the group in Lund University’s research portal

Team members

Link to a list of team members in Lund University’s research portal

Current major grants

Portrait of Giuseppe Giordano. Photograph.

Giuseppe Giordano

Principal Investigator
Associate Professor of public health epidemiology 
+46 73 866 70 90
+46 40 39 10 69
giuseppe [dot] giordano [at] med [dot] lu [dot] se

Giuseppe Giordano's profile in Lund University's research portal

Affiliations