Habibul Ahsan's research while affiliated with University of Illinois at Chicago and other places
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Publications (543)
Body fatness is considered a probable risk factor for biliary tract cancer (BTC),
whereas cholelithiasis is an established factor. Nevertheless, although obesity is an
established risk factor for cholelithiasis, previous studies of the association of body
mass index (BMI) and BTC did not take the effect of cholelithiasis fully into account.
To bett...
Purpose
To investigate the joint relationship of health insurance and clinic visit with hypertension among underserved populations.
Design
Population-based cohort study.
Subjects
Data from 1092 participants from the Chicago Multiethnic Prevention and Surveillance Study (COMPASS) between 2013 and 2020 were analyzed.
Measures
Five health insurance...
Importance:
Despite evidence of an association between reproductive factors and endometrial cancer risk, prospective studies have been conducted mainly in non-Asian countries.
Objective:
To assess the association between reproductive factors, such as number of deliveries, age at menarche, or menopause, and endometrial cancer risk.
Design, setti...
Background:
We conducted a clean fuel intervention trial (Bangladesh Global Environmental and Occupational Health (GEOHealth) (NCT02824237) with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for 26 months among rural Bangladeshi women chronically exposed to household air pollution (HAP) from biomass fuel (BMF) use. We aimed to evaluate the effect of HAP reduction...
Objectives
To examine whether air pollution exposure is associated with central hemodynamic and brachial artery stiffness parameters.
Methods
We assessed central hemodynamic parameters, brachial artery stiffness measures [including brachial artery distensibility (BAD), compliance (BAC), and resistance (BAR)] using waveform analysis of the arterial...
The association of chronic inflammation with colorectal carcinoma (CRC) development is well known in ulcerative colitis (UC). However, the role of inflammatory changes in sporadic CRC pathogenesis is less widely appreciated. In this study, in the first step using RNA-seq, we identified gene-pathway-level changes in UC-associated CRC (UC CRC, n = 10...
Historically, colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates have been lower among African Americans. Previous studies that have examined the relationship between community characteristics and adherence to CRC screening have generally focused on a single community parameter, making it challenging to evaluate the overall impact of the social and built envi...
Background: Previous studies have investigated the association between reproductive factors and lung cancer risk; however, findings have been inconsistent. This study aims to assess the association between reproductive factors with lung cancer incidence and mortality among Asian women.
Methods: A total of 308,949 female participants with a mean age...
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a heterogeneous disease that develops through diverse pathophysiological processes. To characterise the genetic contribution to these processes across ancestry groups, we aggregate genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from 2,535,601 individuals (39.7% non-European ancestry), including 428,452 T2D cases. We identify 1,2...
The BRAF V600E mutation and DNA promoter methylation play important roles in the pathogenesis of thyroid cancer (TC). However, the association of these genetic and epigenetic alterations is not clear. In this study, using paired tumor and surrounding normal tissue from the same patients, on a genome-wide scale we tried to identify (a) any associati...
Most existing TWAS tools require individual-level eQTL reference data and thus are not applicable to summary-level reference eQTL datasets. The development of TWAS methods that can harness summary-level reference data is valuable to enable TWAS in broader settings and enhance power due to increased reference sample size. Thus, we develop a TWAS fra...
Background
Breast cancer survivors face long-term sequelae compared to the general population, suggesting altered metabolic profiles after breast cancer. We used metabolomics approaches to investigate the metabolic differences between breast cancer patients and women in the general population, aiming to elaborate metabolic changes among breast canc...
This study aims to investigate the joint effect of neighborhood disadvantages on asthma prevalence and evaluate whether individual-level variables protect residents against neighborhood disadvantages. Data from the Chicago Multiethnic Prevention and Surveillance Study between 2013 and 2020 were analyzed. Eight neighborhood characteristics were meas...
Introduction
The NIH All of Us Research Program has enrolled over 544,000 participants across the US with unprecedented racial/ethnic diversity, offering opportunities to investigate myriad exposures and diseases. This paper aims to investigate the association between PM2.5 exposure and cancer risks.
Materials and Methods
This work was performed o...
Studies of DNA methylation (DNAm) in solid human tissues are relatively scarce; tissue-specific characterization of DNAm is needed to understand its role in gene regulation and its relevance to complex traits. We generated array-based DNAm profiles for 987 human samples from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, representing 9 tissue types...
We assessed whether personal exposure to household air pollution [PM2.5 and black carbon (BC)] is associated with lung functions (FEV1, FVC, and their ratio) in non-smoking adults in rural Bangladesh. We measured personal exposure to PM2.5 using gravimetric analysis of PM2.5 mass and BC by reflectance measurement between April 2016 and June 2019. T...
Background
Underrepresented persons are often not included in biomedical research. It is unknown if the general Asian American population is being represented in All of Us. The purpose of this study was to compare the Asian demographic data in the All of Us cohort with the Asian nationally representative data from the American Community Survey.
Me...
There is an increase in the incidence of early onset colorectal carcinoma (EOCRC). To better understand if there is any difference in molecular pathogenesis of EOCRC and late onset colo-rectal carcinoma (LOCRC), we compared the clinical, histological, transcriptome, and methylome profile of paired CRC and healthy colonic tissue from 67 EOCRC and 98...
Exposure to inorganic arsenic (As) is recognized as risk factor for basal cell carcinoma (BCC). We have followed-up 7000 adults for 6 years who were exposed to As and had manifest As skin toxicity. Of them, 1.7% developed BCC (males = 2.2%, females = 1.3%). In this study, we compared transcriptome-wide RNA sequencing data from the very first 26 BCC...
Inorganic arsenic (iAs) is a carcinogen, and chronic exposure is associated with adverse health outcomes, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. Consumed iAs can undergo two methylation reactions catalyzed by arsenic methyltransferase (AS3MT), producing monomethylated and dimethylated forms of arsenic (MMA and DMA). Methylation of iAs helps f...
Background
Arsenic exposure increases the risk of several cancers in humans and contributes to genomic instability. Somatic loss of the Y chromosome (LoY) is a potential biomarker of genomic instability and cancer risk. Smoking is associated with LoY, but few other carcinogens have been investigated. We tested the cross-sectional association betwee...
BACKGROUND AND AIM: There is limited evidence on the causal mechanism in the socioeconomic differentials in blood pressure (BP) in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). We, therefore, examined the associations of socioeconomic indicators (SEIs) and BP, socioeconomic disparities in metal mixture exposures, and the potential mediation effect of me...
Background
Understanding the relationship between hypertension and spatial accessibility of primary care can inform interventions to improve hypertension control and awareness, especially among disadvantaged populations. This study aims to investigate the association between spatial accessibility of primary care and hypertension control and awarene...
Introduction
The NIH All of Us Research Program will have the scale and scope to enable research for a wide range of diseases, including cancer. The program’s focus on diversity and inclusion promises a better understanding of the unequal burden of cancer. Preliminary cancer ascertainment in the All of Us cohort from two data sources (self-reported...
Bangladesh, similar to other countries is experiencing an increased burden of cancer. Absence of a national cancer registry has created a gap in the information regarding the presentation of cancer statistics of the country. The objective of this study was to assess the types and distribution of the cancer patients attending a tertiary academic med...
Background:
This study was performed to investigate the association between body mass index (BMI) and gastric cancer (GC) in East and Southeast Asia where most of GC is non-cardia GC.
Methods:
Based on 8,997 GC cases among the Asia Cohort Consortium participants from China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore (N=538,835), we assessed GC risk according t...
This study aims to investigate the race/ethnicity‐specific association between blood type and COVID‐19 susceptibility during March, 2020 and December, 2021 using data from the electronic health record at the University of Chicago Medicine. The study population was stratified into four groups: non‐Hispanic White, non‐Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and ot...
Inorganic arsenic (iAs) is a class I human carcinogen, and exposure to iAs affects >200 million individuals worldwide. In Bangladesh, >57 million individuals are chronically exposed to iAs through drinking-water. There is inter-individual variation in arsenic metabolism efficiency (AME) due to inherited genetic variation, and this variability impac...
Importance:
Marital status has been shown to be associated with mortality, but evidence in Asian populations is limited.
Objective:
To examine the association of marital status with total and cause-specific mortality.
Design, setting, and participants:
This cohort study included individual participant data from 16 prospective studies in the As...
Background
Water arsenic (As) sources beyond a rural household’s primary well may be a significant source for certain individuals, including schoolchildren and men working elsewhere.
Objective
To improve exposure assessment by estimating the fraction of drinking water that comes from wells other than the household’s primary well in a densely popul...
We assembled an ancestrally diverse collection of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in 180,834 affected individuals and 1,159,055 controls (48.9% non-European descent) through the Diabetes Meta-Analysis of Trans-Ethnic association studies (DIAMANTE) Consortium. Multi-ancestry GWAS meta-analysis identified 237 loci atta...
There is limited evidence on the effects of environmental exposure to arsenic (As) on the immune system in adults. In a population-based study, we have found that urinary As (UAs), and its metabolites [inorganic As (InAs), monomethylated arsenicals (MMA +3/+5 ), and dimethylated arsenicals (DMA +3/+5 )] modulate or influence the number of T-helper...
South Asians are at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D). We carried out a genome-wide association meta-analysis with South Asian T2D cases (n = 16,677) and controls (n = 33,856), followed by combined analyses with Europeans (neff = 231,420). We identify 21 novel genetic loci for significant association with T2D (P = 4.7 × 10−8 to 5.2 × 10...
Objective
Tumor registries in integrated healthcare systems (IHCS) have high precision for identifying incident cancer but often miss recently diagnosed cancers or those diagnosed outside of the IHCS. We developed an algorithm using the electronic medical record (EMR) to identify people with a history of cancer not captured in the tumor registry to...
Background:
The association between body mass index (BMI) and oesophageal cancer (OC) has been consistently negative among Asians, whereas different associations based on histological OC subtypes have been observed in Europeans and North Americans. We examined the association between BMI and OC mortality in the Asia Cohort Consortium.
Methods:
W...
Household air pollution (HAP) arising from combustion of biomass fuel (BMF) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in low-income countries. Air pollution may stimulate pro-inflammatory responses by activating diverse immune cells and cyto/chemokine expression, thereby contributing to diseases. We aimed to study cellular immune responses amon...
Background
While cancer screening disparities along socioeconomic and racial/ethnic lines are well studied, differences based on religious affiliation are under-researched. Though diverse in terms of race/ethnicity, Muslim Americans appear to share values and beliefs that similarly inform their health and healthcare seeking behaviors. Cancer screen...
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, with ∼80% of CVD-related deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries. Growing evidence suggests that chronic arsenic exposure may contribute to CVD through its effect on endothelial function in adults. However, few studies have examined the influence of...
Background
Although previous meta-analyses have suggested a dose–response relationship between body mass index (BMI) and thyroid cancer risk, limited evidence has been presented about Asian populations. To assess this association among Asian populations, where underweight is more prevalent than in other regions, a pooled analysis from the Asia Coho...
The All of Us Research Program was designed to enable broad-based precision medicine research in a cohort of unprecedented scale and diversity. Hypertension (HTN) is a major public health concern. The validity of HTN data and definition of hypertension cases in the All of Us (AoU) Research Program for use in rule-based algorithms is unknown. In thi...
Age at first sexual intercourse and age at first birth have implications for health and evolutionary fitness. In this genome-wide association study (age at first sexual intercourse, N = 387,338; age at first birth, N = 542,901), we identify 371 single-nucleotide polymorphisms, 11 sex-specific, with a 5–6% polygenic score prediction. Heritability of...
Background: Telomere length has been associated with the occurrence and progression of common chronic and age-related diseases, and in younger populations, may represent a biomarker of disease susceptibility. Early childhood is a critical period for telomere biology as this period is characterized by a rapid decline in telomere length due to a larg...
In colorectal cancer (CRC), the role of microsatellite instability (MSI) is well known. In a
genome-wide scale, for the first time, we explored whether differential methylation is associated
with MSI. We analyzed 250 paired samples from 125 CRC patients (m = 72, f = 53) at different stages.
Of them, 101 had left-sided CRC, 30 had MSI, 34 had somati...
Importance
The association between long sleep duration and mortality appears stronger in East Asian populations than in North American or European populations.
Objectives
To assess the sex-specific association between sleep duration and all-cause and major-cause mortality in a pooled longitudinal cohort and to stratify the association by age and b...
Background
Accumulating evidence suggests that consuming coffee may lower the risk of death, but evidence regarding tea consumption in Asians is limited. We examined the association between coffee and tea consumption and mortality in Asian populations.
Methods
We used data from 12 prospective cohort studies including 248 050 men and 280 454 women...
Trait-associated genetic variants affect complex phenotypes primarily via regulatory mechanisms on the transcriptome. To investigate the genetics of gene expression, we performed cis- and trans-expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) analyses using blood-derived expression from 31,684 individuals through the eQTLGen Consortium. We detected cis-e...
Despite significant investment, childhood malnutrition continues to be a significant public health problem especially in least developed countries. The aim of this study was to find association between household biomass fuel (BMF) use and childhood malnutrition in Bangladesh using data from Demographic and Health Survey 2011. We included a total 68...
Here we show that FTO as an N ⁶ -methyladenosine (m ⁶ A) RNA demethylase is degraded by selective autophagy, which is impaired by low-level arsenic exposure to promote tumorigenesis. We found that in arsenic-associated human skin lesions, FTO is upregulated, while m ⁶ A RNA methylation is downregulated. In keratinocytes, chronic relevant low-level...
Background:
Common genetic variation in the arsenic methyltransferase (AS3MT) gene region is known to be associated with arsenic metabolism efficiency (AME), measured as the percentage of dimethylarsinic acid (DMA%) in the urine. Rare, protein-altering variants in AS3MT could have even larger effects on AME, but their contribution to AME has not b...
More than one third of world's population use biomass fuel for cooking that has been linked to an array of adverse health hazards including cardiovascular mortality and morbidity. As part of Bangladesh Global Environmental and Occupational Health (GEO Health) project, we assessed whether household air pollution (HAP) was associated with dysfunction...
Hypertension in later life, a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease, has been linked to elevated blood pressure in early life. Exposure to metals may influence childhood blood pressure; however, previous research is limited and has mainly focused on evaluating the toxicity of single metal exposures. This study evaluates the association...
Background: Exposure to heavy metals is frequent in Bangladesh. Previous studies have observed adverse health outcomes of a single environmental exposure using conventional statistical methods that suffer from collinearity and variance inflation due to high dimensionality and multicollinearity among heavy metals. We, thus, examined the joint effect...
Background: Globally, air pollution is one of the major global environmental health threats, and most of the people are suffering worldwide. Without any doubt, global environmental pollution is considered an international public health issue with multiple facets including social, economic, and legislative concerns. The long-term effects associated w...
We assembled an ancestrally diverse collection of genome-wide association studies of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in 180,834 cases and 1,159,055 controls (48.9% non-European descent). We identified 277 loci at genome-wide significance (p<5x10-8), including 237 attaining a more stringent trans-ancestry threshold (p<5x10-9), which were delineated to 338 dis...
Purpose:
The ChicagO Multiethnic Prevention and Surveillance Study or 'COMPASS' is a population-based cohort study with a goal to examine the risk and determinants of cancer and chronic disease. COMPASS aims to address factors causing and/or exacerbating health disparities using a precision health approach by recruiting diverse participants in Chi...
Telomere shortening is a hallmark of aging. Telomere length (TL) in blood cells has been studied extensively as a biomarker of human aging and disease; however, little is known regarding variability in TL in nonblood, disease-relevant tissue types. Here, we characterize variability in TLs from 6391 tissue samples, representing >20 tissue types and...
African American (AA) men experience more than twice the prostate cancer mortality as White men yet are under-represented in academic research involving prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a biomarker of prostate cancer aggressiveness. We examined the impact of self-reported tobacco (cigarette pack-years and current tobacco use including e-cigarettes)...
Objectives
Despite a hypothesised connection of reproductive history with hypertension and mortality, the nature of this association is poorly characterised. We evaluated the association of parity and gravidity with blood pressure, hypertension and all-cause mortality.
Design
Prospective cohort study.
Setting
Health Effects of Arsenic Longitudina...
There are limited data examining the consequences of environmental exposure to arsenic on the immune system in adults, particularly among smokers. Smoking has been shown to exacerbate or contribute to impaired immune function in men chronically exposed to arsenic. In contrast, vitamin D (VitD) is known to have a positive influence on innate and ada...
Background
Little is known about the health harms associated with low-intensity smoking in Asians who, on average, smoke fewer cigarettes and start smoking at a later age than their Western counterparts.
Methods
In this pooled analysis of 738 013 Asians from 16 prospective cohorts, we quantified the associations of low-intensity (<5 cigarettes/day...
African American (AA) populations experience persistent health disparities in the USA. Low representation in bio-specimen research precludes stratified analyses and creates challenges in studying health outcomes among AA populations. Previous studies examining determinants of bio-specimen research participation among minority participants have focu...
Background
Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identified the first genetic loci associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The next step is to use these results to increase our understanding of the biological mechanisms involved. Most of the identified variants likely influence gen...
Arsenic, a class I human carcinogen, is ubiquitously found throughout the environment and around the globe, posing a great public health concern. Notably, Bangladesh and regions of West Bengal have been found to have high levels (0.5–4600 μg/L) of arsenic drinking water contamination, and approximately 50 million of the world's 200 million people c...
Background:
Arsenic exposure affects >100 million people globally and increases risk for chronic diseases. One possible toxicity mechanism is epigenetic modification. Previous epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) have identified associations between arsenic exposure and CpG-specific DNA methylation. To provide additional evidence that observe...
Background:
In human genetics research, it has become common practice for researchers to consider returning genetic information to participants who wish to receive it. Research participants in lower-resource settings may have barriers or competing interests that reduce the benefit or relevance of such information. Thus, the decision to return gene...
Introduction:
Epidemiological studies that investigate alterations in the gut microbial composition associated with smoking are lacking. This study examined the composition of the gut microbiome in smokers compared with non-smokers.
Methods:
Stool samples were collected in a cross-sectional study of 249 participants selected from the Health Effe...