Soren Brage

• PhD
• Group Leader at University of Cambridge

Background Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a major risk factor for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD). This study examined the interplay between watching television and T2D genetic risk for risk of ASCVD. Methods We included 346 916 White British individuals from UK Biobank. A weighted polygenic risk score for T2D was calculated on the basis...

Introduction The ability to perform bodily movement varies in ageing men and women. We investigated whether physical fitness may explain sex differences in daily physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) among older people. Methods In this cross-sectional study, a population-based cohort of 75, 80, and 85-year-old men and women (n = 409, 62% wom...

Background The widespread ownership of digital devices among adolescents presents challenges and opportunities in schools, particularly during recess. This study aimed to examine the association of screen use during recess with physical activity behaviours. Methods The study was based on a population-based cross-sectional study including 1347 adol...

Nutritional epidemiology aims to link dietary exposures to chronic disease, but the instruments for evaluating dietary intake are inaccurate. One way to identify unreliable data and the sources of errors is to compare estimated intakes with the total energy expenditure (TEE). In this study, we used the International Atomic Energy Agency Doubly Labe...

Accurate assessment of body composition is essential for evaluating the risk of chronic disease. 3D body shape, obtainable using smartphones, correlates strongly with body composition. We present a novel method that fits a 3D body mesh to a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) silhouette (emulating a single photograph) paired with anthropometric...

Background This study explored the prospective associations of genetic susceptibility to high blood pressure (BP) and muscle strength with cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, incident coronary heart disease (CHD) and incident stroke. Methods This study included 349 085 white British individuals from the UK Biobank study. Genetic risk of high B...

Background Physical activity (PA) and diet quality have each been shown to be inversely associated with mortality but their combined impact on longevity has been less explored, particularly when considering their changes over time. This study aimed to examine the separate and combined associations of PA, diet quality and their changes over time wit...

Introduction It is unclear whether moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) is associated with a lower mortality risk, over and above its contribution to total physical activity volume. Methods A total of 46,682 adults (mean age: 64 years) were included in a meta-analysis of nine prospective cohort studies. Each cohort generated tertiles of ac...

Importance Excessive screen media use has been associated with poorer mental health among children and adolescents in several observational studies. However, experimental evidence supporting this hypothesis is lacking. Objective To investigate the effects of a 2-week screen media reduction intervention on children’s and adolescents’ mental health....

Prediction of coronary heart disease (CHD) risk through standard equations relying on laboratory-based clinical markers has proven challenging and needs advancement. This study aims to derive and cross-validate CHD-risk prediction models based on lifestyle behaviours including wearables and polygenic risk scores (PRS), and compare their performance...

Despite the wide effects of cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) on metabolic, cardiovascular, pulmonary and neurological health, challenges in the feasibility and reproducibility of CRF measurements have impeded its use for clinical decision-making. Here we link proteomic profiles to CRF in 14,145 individuals across four international cohorts with dive...

Asian people are under-represented in population-based, clinical, and genomic research. 1,2 To address this gap, we have initiated the HELIOS longitudinal cohort study, comprising comprehensive behavioural, phenotypic, and genomic measurements from 10,004 Asian men and women of Chinese, Indian or Malay background. Phenotyping has been carried out u...

We investigated the associations of the measures of arterial health with cognition in adolescents and whether physical activity (PA) or sedentary time (ST) confounds these associations. One hundred sixteen adolescents (71 boys) aged 15.9 ± 0.4 participated in the study. PA and ST were assessed using a combined accelerometer/heart rate monitor. Over...

Objectives A new school policy mandating 45 min physical activity daily during school was introduced in Denmark in 2014. We aimed to evaluate the effect of this policy on BMI in school-aged children. It was hypothesized that the school policy would decrease BMI, especially in the obese fraction of the population (90th percentile BMI). Study design...

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine differences in heart rate variability (HRV) across accelerometer-derived position, self-reported sleep, and different summary measures (sleep, 24h-HRV) in free-living settings using open-source methodology. APPROACH: HRV is a biomarker of autonomic activity. As it is strongly affected by factors such as physic...

Accurate assessment of body composition is essential for evaluating the risk of chronic disease. Access to medical imaging methods is limited due to practical and ethical constraints. 3D body shape, which can be obtained using smartphones, correlates strongly with body composition. However, large-scale datasets containing 3D body shapes with paired...

Introduction The ability to perform bodily movement varies in ageing men and women. We investigated whether physical fitness may explain sex differences in daily physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) among older people. Methods A population-based cohort of 75, 80, and 85-year-old men and women (n=409, 62 % women) underwent laboratory-based a...

Background Increased physical activity (PA) may mitigate the negative cardiovascular health effects of sedentary behavior in adolescents. However, the relationship of PA and sedentary time from childhood with cardiac function in adolescence remains underexplored. Therefore, we investigated the associations of cumulative sedentary time and PA from c...

Objective This study aims to test the association of rest-activity rhythm (intradaily variability and interdaily stability) with all-cause mortality in an older adult cohort in Brazil. It also assesses whether the amount of time spent at each intensity level (i.e., physical activity and nocturnal sleep) interferes with this association. Methods Th...

Background The longitudinal associations between physical behaviours and lean muscle mass indices need to be better understood to aid healthy ageing intervention development. Methods We assessed physical behaviours (total physical activity, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), light physical activity, total sedentary time and prolonged s...

Background This study aimed to assess whether moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), sport and exercise as a proxy measure of muscle and bone strengthening activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep were associated with total-body-less-head (TBLH) bone mineral content (BMC) and TBLH lean mass cross-sectionally and longitudinally from age 6 to...

Background There is limited understanding of the extent to which differences in physical activity across the day and week may be associated with mental wellbeing. Such an understanding is needed for better targeting of interventions. In this study, we describe total and temporal patterning of physical activity across the week in adolescents (age 13...

Introduction : Estimating free-living physical activity (PA) with continuous heart rate (HR) monitoring is challenging due to individual variation in the relationship between HR and energy expenditure. This variation can be captured through individual calibration with graded exercise tests, but structured tests with prescribed load require medical...

Introduction Tobacco use, in both smoking and smokeless forms, is highly prevalent among South Asian adults. The aims of the study were twofold: (1) describe patterns of SLT and combustible tobacco product use in four South Asian countries stratified by country and sex, and (2) assess the relationships between SLT and smoking intensity, smoking qu...

Introduction Tobacco use, in both smoking and smokeless forms, is highly prevalent among South Asian adults. The aims of the study were twofold: (1) describe patterns of SLT and combustible tobacco product use in four South Asian countries stratified by country and sex, and (2) assess the relationships between SLT and smoking intensity, smoking qui...

Background The association of fitness with cancer risk is not clear. Methods We used Cox proportional hazards models to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for risk of lung, colorectal, endometrial, breast, and prostate cancer in a subset of UK Biobank participants who completed a submaximal fitness test in 2009-12 ( N...

Scope To identify metabolites associated with habitual dairy consumption and investigate their associations with type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk. Methods and results Metabolomics assays were conducted in the Fenland ( n = 10,281) and EPIC‐Norfolk ( n = 1,440) studies. Using 82 metabolites assessed in both studies, we developed metabolite scores to clas...

Background Grip strength has prognostic value for aging-related health outcomes. Whether the associations of grip strength with risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) vary by genetic risk of AD and related dementias (ADD) is unknown. Methods This study included 148,659 older adults of white British ancestry (aged ≥60 years) participating in...

Exercise tests can vary greatly across population studies, which has led to the development of many models for exercise heart rate (HR) response. These models do not generalise across tests, making direct comparisons difficult. We developed a model framework that harmonises HR response from any exercise test when completed by the same person. PURP...

There is considerably greater variation in metabolic rates between men than between women, in terms of basal, activity and total (daily) energy expenditure (EE). One possible explanation is that EE is associated with male sexual characteristics (which are known to vary more than other traits) such as musculature and athletic capacity. Such traits m...

Purpose Physical activity is often quantified as physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE), which may be affected by individual ability to sustain physical activity intensity. We examined if there is a true difference in physical activity between older women and men when their physical capacity is considered. Methods Out of the population-based...

Introduction: Estimating free-living physical activity (PA) with continuous heart rate (HR) monitoring is challenging due to individual variation in the relationship between HR and energy expenditure. This variation can be captured through individual calibration with graded exercise tests, but structured tests with prescribed load requires medical...

Background: Excess sedentary time (ST) is recognized as an important modifiable risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD). However, whether the associations of genetic susceptibility with CHD incidence can be modified by replacing wearable-device-measured ST with physical activity (PA) is unknown. Objectives: To examine the associations of we...

Background and Objective We investigated the effects of a combined dietary and PA intervention on cognition in children and whether changes in diet quality, PA, sedentary behavior (SB), and sedentary time (ST) are associated with changes in cognition. Methods We conducted a 2‐year nonrandomized controlled trial in 504 children aged 6–9 years at ba...

Backgrounds: Excess sedentary time (ST) is recognized as an important modifiable risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD). However, whether the associations of genetic susceptibility with CHD incidence can be modified by replacing wearable-device-measured ST with physical activity (PA) is unknown. This study aims to examine the combined associa...

Deep learning models have shown great promise in various healthcare monitoring applications. However, most healthcare datasets with high-quality (gold-standard) labels are small-scale, as directly collecting ground truth is often costly and time-consuming. As a result, models developed and validated on small-scale datasets often suffer from overfit...

Background: Little is known about the associations of a sedentary lifestyle from childhood with cardiac work and function during adolescence. We studied if cumulative sedentary time and physical activity from childhood to adolescence are associated with cardiac work and function in adolescence. Methods: A total of 153 adolescents aged 15 years at t...

Background Tobacco use, in both smoking and smokeless forms, is highly prevalent among South Asian adults. The aims of the study were twofold: 1) describe patterns of SLT and combustible tobacco product use in four South Asian countries stratified by country and sex, and 2) assess the relationships between SLT and smoking intensity, smoking quit at...

Background Car use has been associated with higher risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). However, whether the associations of transport modes with CHD vary by genetic susceptibility to CHD are unknown. This study aims to investigate the associations of genetic susceptibility and modes of transport with incidence of CHD. Methods We included 339,588...

Higher cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower risk of type 2 diabetes. However, the causality of this relationship and the biological mechanisms that underlie it are unclear. Here, we examine genetic determinants of cardiorespiratory fitness in 450k European-ancestry individuals in UK Biobank, by leveraging the genetic overlap between f...

Background No previous studies have examined the associations between changes in objectively-measured physical behaviours with follow-up QoL in older adults. Based on cross-sectional evidence, it is biologically plausible that such associations exist. If so, this bolsters the case for the commissioning of activity interventions and for including Qo...

Background: Early puberty timing is associated with adverse health outcomes. We aimed to examine prospective associations between objectively measured physical activity and puberty timing in boys and girls. Methods: In the UK Millennium Cohort Study, physical activity volume and intensities at 7 years were measured using accelerometers. Status o...

Introduction Few large studies have evaluated the relationship between resting heart rate (RHR) and cardiorespiratory fitness. Here we examine cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between RHR and fitness, explore factors that influence these relationships, and demonstrate the utility of RHR for remote population monitoring. Methods In cr...

Objectives: Traditional jumping-dance rituals performed by Maasai men involve prolonged physical exertion that may contribute significantly to overall physical activity level. We aimed to objectively quantify the metabolic intensity of jumping-dance activity and assess associations with habitual physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF...

Obesity is caused by a prolonged positive energy balance1,2. Whether reduced energy expenditure stemming from reduced activity levels contributes is debated3,4. Here we show that in both sexes, total energy expenditure (TEE) adjusted for body composition and age declined since the late 1980s, while adjusted activity energy expenditure increased ove...

Importance: The association of cardiorespiratory fitness with cancer risk is not clear. Objective: To investigate whether fitness is associated with the risk of diagnosis of common cancers. Design, setting, and participants: In observational analyses, we used multivariable-adjusted Cox proportional hazards models to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and...

Background: Higher nocturnal heart rate and lower nocturnal heart rate variability (HRV) is associated with increased cardiovascular disease mortality. Longitudinal studies on nocturnal HRV in people living with HIV (PLWH) are lacking. Methods: We conducted a one-year prospective cohort study of adult PLWH and HIV-uninfected community controls i...

Background Previous studies demonstrated a relation between takeaway outlet exposure and health outcomes. Individual characteristics, such as eating behaviour traits, could make some people more susceptible to the influence of the food environment. Few studies have investigated this topic. We aimed to investigate the moderating role of eating behav...

Purpose: Few longitudinal studies have investigated the interwoven longitudinal dynamics between physical activity (PA), motor performance, and academic skills in middle childhood. Therefore, we investigated the cross-lagged associations between PA, motor performance, and academic skills from Grade 1 to Grade 3 in Finnish primary-school children....

Introduction: Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is rarely measured in population studies. Most studies of CRF do not examine differences by population subgroups or seasonal trends. We examined how estimated CRF levels vary by anthropometric, sociodemographic, and behavioural characteristics in a population-based cohort of UK adults (the Fenland Stud...

Objective To estimate the dose–response associations between non-occupational physical activity and several chronic disease and mortality outcomes in the general adult population. Design Systematic review and cohort-level dose-response meta-analysis. Data sources PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and reference lists of published studies. Eligibilit...

Background Insufficient sleep has been associated with weight gain and metabolic dysregulation, with one suggested mechanism being through reduction in diet quality. Experimental evidence supports a causal effect of sleep timings on diet but this may not be applicable to a free-living adolescent population. In this analysis we use daily measures of...

A atividade física (AF) e a inflamação influenciam a densidade óssea através de múltiplos mecanismos fisiológicos, mas a atual evidência não é robusta sobre a estrutura de mediação dessas relações. Portanto, o objetivo deste estudo foi investigar as associações de AF e interleucina-6 sérica (IL-6) na densidade óssea. Análise transversal na Coorte d...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between accelerometer-derived physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) and incident type 2 diabetes (T2D) in a cohort of middle-aged adults and within subgroups. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Data were from 90,096 UK Biobank participants without prevalent diabetes (mean 62 years of age; 57% women) who wore...

Background A new Danish school policy with a requirement for 45 min physical activity daily during school hours was introduced in 2014. The objective of this natural experiment was to evaluate the effect of this nationwide school policy on physical activity in Danish children and adolescents. Methods Four historical studies completed between 2009...

The application of multiple omics technologies in biomedical cohorts has the potential to reveal patient-level disease characteristics and individualized response to treatment. However, the scale and heterogeneous nature of multi-modal data makes integration and inference a non-trivial task. We developed a deep-learning-based framework, multi-omics...

Cardiorespiratory fitness is an established predictor of metabolic disease and mortality. Fitness is directly measured as maximal oxygen consumption (VO 2 m a x ), or indirectly assessed using heart rate responses to standard exercise tests. However, such testing is costly and burdensome because it requires specialized equipment such as treadmills...

Deep learning models have shown great promise in various healthcare applications. However, most models are developed and validated on small-scale datasets, as collecting high-quality (gold-standard) labels for health applications is often costly and time-consuming. As a result, these models may suffer from overfitting and not generalize well to uns...

Considering physical activity (PA) volume and intensity may provide novel insights into the relationships of PA with bone, lean, and fat mass. This study aimed to assess the associations of PA volume, PA intensity distribution, including moderate‐to‐vigorous PA (MVPA) with total‐body‐less‐head bone mineral content (BMC), lean, and fat mass in child...

Aims: The interplay between physical activity (PA) volume and intensity is poorly understood in relation to cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. This study aimed to investigate the role of PA intensity, over and above volume, in relation to incident CVD. Methods and results: Data were from 88,412 UK Biobank middle-aged adults (58% women) without p...

Background: Sleep duration is associated with BMI and waist circumference. However, less is known about whether sleep duration affects different measurements of obesity differently. Objective: To investigate the association between sleep duration and different measures of obesity. Methods: In this cross-sectional analysis 1309, Danish, older a...

Unlabelled: To develop healthy ageing interventions, longitudinal associations between objectively assessed physical behaviours and physical function need to be better understood. We assessed associations between accelerometer-assessed total physical activity (PA), moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), light physical activity (LPA), seden...

Studies have linked higher digital screen use with poorer mental health. However, there is limited experimental evidence to suggest a causal relationship. In this trial, we aimed to investigate the effects of limiting recreational digital screen use on mental well-being, mood, and biomarkers of stress in healthy young and middle-aged adults. We ran...

Although physical activity and sedentary behavior are moderately heritable, little is known about the mechanisms that influence these traits. Combining data for up to 703,901 individuals from 51 studies in a multi-ancestry meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies yields 99 loci that associate with self-reported moderate-to-vigorous intensit...

Background We previously demonstrated a relationship between takeaway outlet exposure and consumption of hot takeaway food and body mass. Little research has investigated whether individual differences in eating behaviour traits represent differences in susceptibility to these environmental influences on food consumption and body weight. The curren...

Introduction Research on the associations of physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness with β-cell dysfunction and insulin resistance among adults in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is limited. We assessed the association of physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness with β-cell function, insulin resistance and diabetes among people living with...

Objectives Considering the importance of the early life period, in conjunction with the increasing prevalence of adiposity and insufficient physical activity already evident in early childhood, this study aimed to determine associations between abdominal adiposity, body size, and objectively measured physical activity in infancy. Methods Infants (...

Background: To explore activity behaviors at school entry, we describe temporal/demographic associations with accelerometer-measured physical activity in a population-based sample of British 6-year-olds, and examine change from ages 4 to 6. Methods: A total of 712 six-year-olds (308 at both ages) wore Actiheart accelerometers for ≥3 (mean 6.0) d...

Introduction: To examine the associations between physical behaviors and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) risk markers in middle-aged South African men and women. Research design and methods: This cross-sectional study included middle-aged men (n=403; age: median (IQR), 53.0 (47.8–58.8) years) and women (n=324; 53.4 (49.1–58.1) years) from Soweto,...

Background: This study explored the associations of genetic susceptibility and adherence to a healthy lifestyle with incident coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke in individuals with hypertension. Method: This study included 258,531 European descendants with hypertension at baseline from UK Biobank. Genetic risk of CHD and stroke was estimate...

Background: We first explored the associations between physical behaviors and total and regional adiposity. Second, we examined how reallocating time in different physical behaviors was associated with total body fat mass in men and women from a low-income South African setting. Methods: This cross-sectional study included a sample of 692 partic...

There is a lack of data on physical activity (PA), active travel, and the comparison of measurement instruments in low-resource settings. The objective of this paper is to describe PA behaviour and the agreement of walking estimates from the Global Physical Activity Questionnaire (GPAQ) and the travel diary in a low-resource setting. We used a cros...

Objectives Physical activity in paediatric and young adult patients suffering from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) may play an important role in the overall health status. However, physical activity in these patients has not been reported using objective methods. We aimed to describe accelerometry-measured physical activity levels in paediatric an...

Background Whether the associations of time spent in screen-based sedentary activities with CHD vary by genetic susceptibility is currently unknown. The objective of this study was to examine the interplay of genetic susceptibility to CHD and two prevalent types of screen-based sedentary activities (television [TV] viewing and computer use) for CHD...

Importance: Children and adults spend large amounts of their leisure time using screen media, which may affect their health and behavior. Objective: To investigate the effect of reducing household recreational screen media use on physical activity and sleep in children and adults. Design, setting, and participants: This was a cluster randomize...