Cardiometabolic Disease in African Migrants and Non-Migrants: the RODAM Study and Future Interventions
Professor Charles Agyemang (University of Amsterdam)
Cardiometabolic diseases (CMD) are a major global burden. Despite the overall improvement in CMD outcomes in the past decades among the general population living in high-income countries such as Europe and North America, large differences in CMD morbidity and mortality exist between migrant and host populations in these countries. In general, migrant populations have worse CMD outcomes than the host populations for reasons that are still unclear. Similarly, CMD pose a major challenge in low-and middle-income countries where most migrant populations originate from. Understanding the drivers behind these disparities may help to mitigate the unequal burden of CMD and to identify new causal pathways that contribute to CMD risk in these population.
This lecture discusses CMD burden and drivers among migrant and non-migrant African populations drawing on lessons learnt from the RODAM study. Furthermore, interventions to address CMD challenges will be discussed using our ongoing Horizon projects such as Generation-H and M-CARE as exemplars.
About the speaker
Prof. Charles Agyemang is a Professor of Global Migration, Ethnicity and Health at Amsterdam University Medical Centres, University of Amsterdam; and an Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, USA. Prof. Agyemang is currently the Vice President of the Migrant Health section & Secretary of the Governing Council of the European Public Health Association; Scientific Chair of the Global Society of Migration, Ethnicity, Race & Health; a member of the prestigious US National Academy of Medicine, European Academy, The Lancet Racial Equality Advisory Board, & World Health Organisation taskforce on NCDs in Migrants. His research is focused on migrant health & NCDs in LMICs. He is the PI of European Commission and European Research Council funded projects: RODAM study, Pros-RODAM study (www.rod-am.eu) and Generation-H study (https://www.generationh.org/) and M-CARE study. Prof. Agyemang is a highly productive scholar with over 400 research articles, reviews and book chapters. He is Section Editor for Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA), and an Associate Editor for Internal and Emergency Medicine.
