You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 8, Issue 1
  • Contributions of amino acid, acylcarnitine and sphingolipid profiles to type 2 diabetes risk among South-Asian Surinamese and Dutch adults

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

XML
Epidemiology/Health Services Research
Contributions of amino acid, acylcarnitine and sphingolipid profiles to type 2 diabetes risk among South-Asian Surinamese and Dutch adults
  1. Mirthe Muilwijk1,
  2. Susan M I Goorden2,
  3. Carlos Celis-Morales3,
  4. Michel H Hof4,
  5. Karen Ghauharali-van der Vlugt2,
  6. Femke S Beers-Stet2,
  7. Jason M R Gill3,
  8. Frédéric M Vaz2,
  9. Irene G M van Valkengoed1
  1. 1Department of Public Health, Amsterdam Public Health Research Institute, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  2. 2Laboratory Genetic Metabolic Diseases, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  3. 3BHF Glasgow Cardiovascular Research Centre, Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
  4. 4Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  1. Correspondence to Dr Mirthe Muilwijk; m.muilwijk{at}amsterdamumc.nl

Abstract

Introduction People of South Asian origin are at high risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D), but the underpinning mechanisms are not fully understood. We determined ethnic differences in acylcarnitine, amino acid and sphingolipid concentrations and determined the associations with T2D.

Research design and methods Associations between these metabolites and incident T2D among Dutch and South-Asian Surinamese were determined in participants from the Healthy Life in an Urban Setting (HELIUS) study (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) using Prentice-weighted Cox regression. The HELIUS study includes 95 incident T2D cases and a representative subcohort of 700 people from a cohort of 5977 participants with a mean follow-up of 4 years.

Results Concentrations of acylcarnitines were comparable between both ethnic groups. Amino acid and lactosylceramide concentrations were higher among South-Asian Surinamese than Dutch (eg, isoleucine 65.7 (SD 16.3) vs 60.7 (SD 15.6) µmol/L). Ceramide concentrations were lower among South-Asian Surinamese than Dutch (eg, Cer d18:1 8.48 (SD 2.04) vs 9.08 (SD 2.29) µmol/L). Metabolic dysregulation preceded T2D without evidence for a multiplicative interaction by ethnicity. Most amino acids and (dihydro)ceramides were associated with increased risk (eg, Cer d18:1 HR 2.38, 95% CI 1.81 to 3.12) while acylcarnitines, glycine, glutamine and lactosylceramides were associated with decreased risk for T2D (eg, LacCer d18:2 HR 0.56, 95% CI 0.42 to 0.77).

Conclusions Overall, these data suggest that the disturbances underlying amino acid and sphingolipid metabolism may be predictive of T2D risk in populations of both South Asian and European background. These observations may be used as starting point to unravel the underlying metabolic disturbances.

  • metabolism
  • epidemiology
  • ethnic differences
  • type 2 diabetes
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjdrc-2019-001003

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors MM and IGMvV designed the study. MM, SMIG, MHH, KG-vdV, FSB-S, FMV and IGMvV contributed to data collection. MM conducted the analyses and drafted the manuscript. SMIG, CC-M, MHH, KG-vdV, FSB-S, JMRG, FMV and IGMvV reviewed the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. MM is the guarantor of the study.

    • Funding This work was supported by the European Union Health Programme 2014–2020 (grant number 664609 HP-PJ-2014). The HELIUS study is conducted by the Academic Medical Center Amsterdam and the Public Health Service of Amsterdam. Both organizations provided core support for HELIUS. The HELIUS study is also funded by the Dutch Heart Foundation, the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw), the European Union (FP-7), and the European Fund for the Integration of non-EU immigrants (EIF).

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Ethics approval The Institutional Review Board of the Amsterdam Medical Center approved the HELIUS study (MREC 10/100# 17.10.1729). All participants provided written informed consent.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data availability statement Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available. The HELIUS data are owned by the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Any researcher can request the data by submitting a proposal to the HELIUS Executive Board as outlined at http://www.heliusstudy.nl/en/researchers/collaboration. Requests for further information and proposals can be submitted to the scientific coordinator and data manager of HELIUS, at info@heliusstudie.nl. The HELIUS Executive Board will check proposals for compatibility with the general objectives, ethical approvals and informed consent forms of the HELIUS study, and potential overlap with ongoing work affiliated with HELIUS. There are no other restrictions to obtaining the data and all data requests will be processed in the same manner.