Marinka Steur

Supervisor: Dr Adam Butterworth

Title: Gene-diet interactions and risk of coronary heart disease in EPIC-Heart

Abstract: Although it has been well established that CHD is in part genetically determined, much of the estimated heritability remains unexplained. Intake of dietary factors is also associated with CHD risk, often through similar intermediate risk factors. Effect modification of genetic susceptibility by dietary intake may therefore account for some of the ‘missing heritability’ of CHD and may partly explain the considerable between-study heterogeneity seen in nutritional epidemiology. My PhD will focus on exploring gene-diet interactions and their associations with incident CHD in EPIC-Heart, a nested casecohort study of 12,000 CHD cases and 15,000 referents drawn from 520,000 participants across Europe. Discovery of gene-diet interactions should yield new insights into pathways leading to CHD and may identify undiscovered genetic loci associated with CHD.