Frank B Hu's research while affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital and other places
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Publications (980)
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Background
The mother–child inheritance of DNA methylation (DNAm) variations could contribute to the inheritance of disease susceptibility across generations. However, no study has investigated patterns of mother–child associations in DNAm at the genome-wide scale. It remains unknown whether there are sex differences in mother–child DNAm associatio...
Multiple dietary patterns have been associated with different diseases; however, their comparability to improve overall health has yet to be determined. Here, in 205,852 healthcare professionals from three US cohorts followed for up to 32 years, we prospectively assessed two mechanism-based diets and six diets based on dietary recommendations in re...
Nuts are nutrient-rich foods that contain many bioactive compounds that are beneficial for cardiovascular health. Higher consumption of nuts has been associated with a reduced risk of several cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in prospective cohort studies, including a 19% and 25% lower risk of CVD incidence and mortality, respectively, and a 24% and 27...
Diabetes is a continuously growing global concern affecting >10% of adults, which may be mitigated by modifiable lifestyle factors. Consumption of nuts and their inclusion in dietary patterns has been associated with a range of beneficial health outcomes. Diabetes guidelines recommend dietary patterns that incorporate nuts; however, specific recomm...
Background:
Despite the potential protective effect of a plant-based diet against chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), it remains unknown whether intake of different types of plant foods is beneficial for COPD. Our aims were to determine whether adherence to the healthful version of a plant-based diet (healthful Plant-based Diet Index (hP...
While the maternal intrauterine metabolic environment has been recognized to have a profound impact on fetal growth and development with lifelong health implications, to our knowledge, there have been few large‐scale birth cohort studies linking the cord metabolome (reflecting both the maternal and fetal metabolic state) with postnatal height measu...
Background:
Sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) have been implicated in fueling the obesity epidemic.
Objectives:
This study aimed to update a synthesis of the evidence on SSBs and weight gain in children and adults.
Methods:
MEDLINE, Embase, and Cochrane databases were searched through September 8, 2022, for prospective cohort studies and random...
Background
Adhering to a Mediterranean Diet (MedDiet) is associated with a healthier cardiometabolic profile. However, there are limited studies on the MedDiet benefits for non-Mediterranean racial/ethnic minorities, for whom this diet may be unfamiliar and inaccessible and who have a high risk of chronic diseases.
Objective
To describe the study...
Importance
Low-carbohydrate diets decrease hemoglobin A 1c (HbA 1c ) among patients with type 2 diabetes at least as much as low-fat diets. However, evidence on the effects of low-carbohydrate diets on HbA 1c among individuals with HbA 1c in the range of prediabetes to diabetes not treated by diabetes medications is limited.
Objective
To study the...
Background
Mediterranean (MED) diet is a rich source of polyphenols, which benefit adiposity by several mechanisms. We explored the effect of the green-MED diet, twice fortified in dietary polyphenols and lower in red/processed meat, on visceral adipose tissue (VAT).
Methods
In the 18-month Dietary Intervention Randomized Controlled Trial PoLyphen...
Objectives:
To assess the association of whole grain consumption with the risk of incident knee osteoarthritis (OA).
Methods:
We followed 2,846 participants in the Osteoarthritis Initiative aged 45 to 79 years. Participants were free from radiographic knee OA (Kellgren-Lawrence grade < 2) in at least one knee at baseline. Dietary data from basel...
Background
Multiple dietary patterns haven been recommended by 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD). The adherence to these patterns and its relationship with risk of CVD remain unclear in the US Hispanic/Latino population.
Objectives
We aimed to evaluate three healthy eating patterns measur...
Dietary patterns (DP) rich in plant foods are associated with improved health and reduced non-communicable disease risk. In October 2021, the Nutrition Society hosted a member-led conference, held online over 2 half days, exploring the latest research findings examining plant-rich DP and health. The aim of the present paper is to summarise the cont...
The transmission in intergenerational overweight and obesity (OW/OB) from mothers to their offspring has been widely explored in numerous studies. This phenomenon of OW/OB is a greater concern globally in particular among low-income households. However, studies conducted to determine the factors associated with OW/OB among mother-child pairs in low...
Background:
Plant-based diets are recommended for chronic disease prevention, yet there has been little focus on plant-based diet quality among participants of South Asian ancestry who consume a predominantly plant-based diet.
Objective:
We evaluated cross-sectional and prospective associations between plant-based diet quality and cardiometaboli...
Background: Type 2 diabetes (T2D) has been associated with increased risk of breast cancer. However, the role of metformin, the first-line anti-diabetic drug, in breast cancer carcinogenesis has not been elucidated completely. We aimed to examine further the association between the use of metformin and other anti-diabetic medication and breast canc...
Background: Low-carbohydrate diets decrease hemoglobin A1c among patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. However, evidence on effects of low-carbohydrate diets on hemoglobin A1c among individuals with prediabetes is limited.
Methods: We conducted a randomized parallel-group trial of 150 adults aged 40-70 years with untreated hemoglobin A1c from 6.0...
Background
The obesity epidemic in the USA continues to grow nationwide. Although excess weight-related mortality has been studied in general, less is known about how it varies by demographic subgroup within the USA. In this study we estimated excess mortality associated with elevated body weight nationally and by state and subgroup.
Methods
We de...
Moderate coffee consumption (2–5 cups per day) has been consistently associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease in epidemiological studies. For most individuals, a caffeine intake of up to 400 mg per day is safe and moderate coffee consumption can be included as part of a healthy lifestyle.
Objective:
To examine the association between intakes of sodium and potassium and the ratio of sodium to potassium and incident myocardial infarction and stroke.
Design, setting and participants:
Prospective cohort study of 180,156 Veterans aged 19 to 107 years with plausible dietary intake measured by food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) who were...
Background:
The effect of diet on age-related brain atrophy is largely unproven.
Objective:
To explore the effect of a Mediterranean diet higher in polyphenols and lower in red/processed meat (Green-MED diet) on age-related brain atrophy.
Methods:
This 18-month clinical trial longitudinally measured brain structure volumes by magnetic-resonanc...
Asian Americans (AsA), Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (NHPI) comprise 7.7% of the U.S. population, and AsA have had the fastest growth rate since 2010. Yet the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has invested only 0.17% of its budget on AsA and NHPI research between 1992 and 2018. More than 40 ethnic subgroups are included within AsA and N...
Objective:
We examined lifestyle factors with midlife weight change according to history of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) in a large longitudinal female cohort.
Research design and methods:
In the Nurses' Health Study II, we categorized changes in lifestyle within 4-year periods and estimated their associations with concurrent changes in b...
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Background: The relationship between sodium intake and cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains controversial, in part, due to inaccurate assessment of sodium intake. 24-hour urinary excretion over multiple days is considered the optimal method.
Methods: We included individual participant data from 6 prospective cohorts among generally healthy adults w...
Introduction: Atherosclerosis, the main underlying causes of coronary heart disease (CHD) and ischemic stroke, is an inflammatory condition. However, therapeutics targeting inflammation for CHD and stroke are limited, partially due to insufficient evidence for causal inflammatory pathways and druggable targets.
Objectives: We aimed to identify caus...
Background
The relation between sodium intake and cardiovascular disease remains controversial, owing in part to inaccurate assessment of sodium intake. Assessing 24-hour urinary excretion over a period of multiple days is considered to be an accurate method.
Methods
We included individual-participant data from six prospective cohorts of generally...
Objective
To examine the association between weight change and mortality among participants with incident type 2 diabetes (T2D) and evaluate the impact of adopting a healthy lifestyle on this association.
Research Design and Methods
This prospective analysis included 11,262 incident T2D patients from the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professiona...
Poor diet quality is strongly associated with elevated risk of cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality. This scientific statement emphasizes the importance of dietary patterns beyond individual foods or nutrients, underscores the critical role of nutrition early in life, presents elements of heart-healthy dietary patterns, and highlights str...
The association between religion, spirituality, and body weight is controversial, given the methodological limitations of existing studies. Using the Nurses’ Health Study II cohort, follow-up occurred from 2001 to 2015, with up to 35,547 participants assessed for the religious or spiritual coping and religious service attendance analyses. Cox regre...
There is increasing recognition on the role of early life metabolic programming in childhood obesity. This study sought to investigate whether newborn cord blood metabolome can predict future BMI. It included 946 children in the Boston Birth Cohort, a sample of high-risk yet understudied US urban, low-income, predominantly Black and Hispanic childr...
Traditionally, nutritional epidemiology is the study of the relationship between diet and health and disease in humans at the population level. Commonly, the exposure of interest is food intake. In recent years, nutritional epidemiology has moved from a “black box” approach to a systems approach where genomics, metabolomics and proteomics are provi...
Purpose
To investigate religion and spirituality (R/S) as psychosocial factors in type 2 diabetes risk.
Methods
Using the Nurses’ Health Study II, we conducted a 14-year prospective analysis of 46,713 women with self-reported use of religion or spiritual beliefs to cope with stressful situations, and 42,825 women with self-reported religious servi...
Background: Whether weight change around type 2 diabetes (T2D) diagnosis is associated with long-term survival is unclear. We aimed to examine the association between weight change and mortality among participants with incident T2D and evaluate impacts of lifestyle on this association.
Methods: This prospective analysis included 11,262 incident T2D...
The traditional Mediterranean diet is considered the world’s most evidence-based eating pattern for promoting health and longevity. However, institutional food environments and their busy consumers often sacrifice health benefits for the convenience of faster and cheaper foods that generally are of lower quality and are more processed, and thus, co...
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) continues to remain a significant public health burden with an increasing trend towards younger adults. This chapter reviews the historical evidence surrounding the role of whole grain (WG) in T2D, while considering both epidemiological data and results from randomized controlled trials. Several well-established prospective co...
The relation between body mass index (BMI, kg/m2) and mortality among survivors of myocardial infarction (MI) remains controversial. We examined the relationship of BMI before and after MI, and change in weight, with all-cause mortality among participants of the Nurses' Health Study (1980-2016) and Health Professionals Follow up Study (1988-2016) c...
The exposome represents the array of dietary, lifestyle, and demographic factors to which an individual is exposed. Individual components of the exposome, or groups of components, are recognized as influencing many aspects of human physiology, including cardiometabolic health. However, the influence of the whole exposome on health outcomes is poorl...
Background
Branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) are essential amino acids common throughout the US diet. While circulating BCAAs have been implicated in insulin resistance and some obesity-related cancers, the relationship between dietary intake of BCAAs and incident breast cancer is unknown. We sought to evaluate the association between long-term di...
Background:
Type 2 diabetes increases risk of developing colorectal cancer (CRC), but the association of pre-existing diabetes with CRC survival remains unclear.
Methods:
We analyzed survival by diabetes status at cancer diagnosis among 4038 patients with CRC from two prospective U.S. cohorts. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to calc...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Objectives
To study total, processed, and unprocessed red meat in relation to risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) and to estimate the effects of substituting other protein sources for red meat with CHD risk.
Design
Prospective cohort study with repeated measures of diet and lifestyle factors.
Setting
Health Professionals Follow-Up Study cohort,...
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), principally ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, are the leading cause of global mortality and a major contributor to disability. This paper reviews the magnitude of total CVD burden, including 13 underlying causes of cardiovascular death and 9 related risk factors, using estimates from the Global Burden of Disea...
Background:
Hyperinsulinemia and higher insulin-like growth factors may increase breast cancer risk. We evaluated a diabetes risk reduction diet (DRRD) and breast cancer risk.
Objectives:
We prospectively evaluated the association between adherence to a DRRD and the incidence of breast cancer.
Methods:
We followed 88,739 women from the Nurses'...
Background
The influence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) duration on cancer incidence remains poorly understood.
Methods
We prospectively followed for cancer incidence 113,429 women in the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS, 1978-2014) and 45,604 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS, 1988-2014) who were free of diabetes and cancer at bas...
Observational studies report that physical activity and metformin are associated with improved clinical outcome in patients with cancer. Inflammation is one biological mechanism hypothesized to mediate these associations. In this phase II, multi-center, 2x2 factorial trial, 139 patients with breast and colorectal cancer who completed standard thera...
In many countries, a large majority of adults consume caffeine daily. This review summarizes the evidence about the varied physiological effects of caffeine and coffee and the risks of cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, gallstones, cancer, and liver disease.
Objective
To examine the associations between the intake of total and individual whole grain foods and the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Design
Prospective cohort studies.
Setting
Nurses’ Health Study (1984-2014), Nurses’ Health Study II (1991-2017), and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (1986-2016), United States.
Participants
158 259 women and 3...
Background: Experimental studies found that the functionality of high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) may be lost in the presence of diabetes mellitus (DM). We prospectively tested whether DM modified the association between HDL-C concentrations and cardiovascular disease (CVD).
Methods: Included were 91,354 Chinese adults (8,244 participan...
Background: Women with a history of GDM are at exceptionally high risk of T2D but adopting a healthy lifestyle may mitigate this risk.
Methods: We analyzed 4,287 women with a prior clinician diagnosis of GDM from the Nurses’ Health Study II cohort as part of the Diabetes and Women’s Health Study. Healthy lifestyle factors, which were assessed ever...
Few studies have evaluated the association between a healthful plant-based diet and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). We followed 50,290 women in Nurses’ Health Study (NHS, 1992 to 2000) and 51,784 women in NHSII (1993 to 2001) for eight years to investigate changes in plant-based diet quality in relation to changes in physical and mental HRQ...
We examined interactions between lifestyle factors and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D-GR), captured by genetic risk score (GRS) and family history (FH). Our initial study cohort included 20,524 European-ancestry participants, of whom 1,897 developed incident T2D, in the Nurses' Health Study (1984-2016), Nurses' Health Study II (1989-2016), an...
IL-13 hits the gym
Interleukin-13 (IL-13) is a cytokine secreted by T cells, innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s), and granulocytes. It acts as a central mediator in allergy and antihelminth defense with various effects. Knudsen et al. report a distinct role for IL-13 in exercise and metabolism (see the Perspective by Correia and Ruas). Mice subjected to...
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) remains a major epidemiological, clinical and biomedical challenge. During CKD, renal tubular epithelial cells (TECs) suffer a persistent inflammatory and profibrotic response. Fatty acid oxidation (FAO), the main source of energy for TECs, is reduced in kidney fibrosis and contributes to its pathogenesis. To determine...
Despite decades of unequivocal evidence that waist circumference provides both independent and additive information to BMI for predicting morbidity and risk of death, this measurement is not routinely obtained in clinical practice. This Consensus Statement proposes that measurements of waist circumference afford practitioners with an important oppo...
Purpose:
An inverse association between physical activity (PA) and risk of coronary heart disease has been seen in many studies, but evidence for benefits of PA after myocardial infarction (MI) in reducing mortality is limited.
Methods:
Using data from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study cohort, we followed male survivors of MI. Short term...
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Background:
Cooking practice has transitioned from use of solid fuels to use of clean fuels, with addition of better ventilation facilities. However, the change in mortality risk associated with such a transition remains unclear.
Methods:
The China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) Study enrolled participants (aged 30-79 years) from ten areas across China;...