Vydiant

Almost a million scientific abstracts and articles are published per year many of which are focused on factors (nutrients, foods, diets, physical activities, social determinants, social activities, psychological, and others) that positively or negatively affect a condition or disease. Even research and medical experts are challenged to keep up with the pace of biomedical research – an ever increasing obstacle for developing personalized health recommendations and treatments.

Vydiant has created and is perfecting a machine learning pipeline that extracts meaningful semantic relations between factors and conditions and subsequently analyzed, curated, managed, and visualized in our OneHealth knowledge base (OHkb). We described the pipeline at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Digital Health (ICDH), which were summarized in a peer reviewed article (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9861086). The OHkb powers our public – targeted OneHealth GO app and our healthcare provider-targeted OneHealth Pro web application.

M. J. Morine, C. Priami, E. Coronado, J. Haber and J. Kaput, "A Comprehensive and Holistic Health Database," 2022 IEEE International Conference on Digital Health (ICDH), 2022, pp. 202-207, doi: 10.1109/ICDH55609.2022.00039.

The majority of participants in genome wide association studies are of European genetic ancestry (~86%) with the rest ~10% of Asians, ~2% African-American or Afro-Caribbean, ~1.3% Hispanic/Latino (https://lnkd.in/gbYtTzN).

The Population Architecture Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) team analyzed ~50,000 non-Europeans for just 26 phenotypes and demonstrated that at least 132 SNPs had differences in effect size across ancestral populations (https://lnkd.in/gAFg8VE). Scaling these numbers to the GWAS catalog suggest a very large number of associations would be affected by ancestry. The effect size of at least some (if not many) variants may also be differentially affected by diet and environment further complicating simplistic use of gene-variant associations.

The inescapable conclusions are (i) that single SNP or polygenic risk scores can currently be used for individuals of European ancestry, (ii) ignoring ancestry in direct-to-consumer or clinical decisions may have serious health consequences (example in paper), and (iii) the continued lack of diversity of participants in GWAS (and other genetic studies) exacerbates existing health disparities and prevents equitable development of precision medicine and nutrition.

Recommending and using micronutrient supplements remains controversial primarily because of the inconsistencies in published data. Since vitamins and minerals are indispensable components of metabolic processes, determining nutrient status and needs are required for improving personal and therefore public health

A recent report (https://tinyurl.com/y44d7at6) used NHANES 2009 – 2012 data provides more evidence that significant proportions of U.S. population in the age groups 2y – 8y and 9y – 18y have micronutrient intakes below estimated average requirements (ERA). Vitamins A, D, E, and C, folate, calcium, and magnesium are the most under-consumed micronutrients. Fortification and dietary supplements reduced the percentage of children and teens below the ERA.

While the goal that all dietary needs come from whole foods is desirable and laudable, the changing nutrient content in agricultural products, climate change, political instability, and personal and public economic factors make it difficult for ~2 billion individuals to meet their micronutrient needs through food alone.

Nutrients in the US Diet: Naturally Occurring or Enriched/Fortified Food and Beverage Sources, Plus Dietary Supplements: NHANES 2009–2012 ABSTRACTBackground. Nutrients are added to the diet through fortification/enrichment and dietary supplements (DSs). Meeting the US Dietary Reference Intakes (D