Using modeling to better understand the Mediterranean diet’s impact on cardiovascular disease risk
Meet the AIMINGS Center’s First Pilot Awardee, Dr. Chao-Qiang Lai
The Mediterranean diet has been studied extensively to better understand its impact on a variety of health outcomes, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cognitive function. One area that lacks research is the diet’s impact on health outcomes of individuals.
The First AIMINGS Pilot Award
In 2022, the AIMINGS Center released its first call for proposals to seek research pilot projects that develop and utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and other computer-aided approaches to facilitate precision nutrition, an emerging field that aims to provide tailored dietary and nutritional recommendations for individuals based on their different characteristics and circumstances in order to prevent and treat diseases and improve overall health and wellbeing. This effort will continue each year until 2027.
Using data from the United Kingdom (U.K.) Biobank, the first awarded pilot project seeks to use computer modeling and deep learning techniques to indicate which individuals see a lowering of their heart disease risk in response to adhering to a Mediterranean diet.
Meet Dr. Lai, Project Investigator
Dr. Lai is currently a USDA-ARS molecular biologist and geneticist at Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory, JM-USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. His research focuses on identifying genetic and environmental factors that affect heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and longevity in humans, and to understand how these factors and their interaction influence these diseases and human aging.
Dr. Lai’s Project: Using Deep Learning to Simulate Individual Responses to the Mediterranean Diet as Affecting Cardiovascular Disease Risk
Taking a top-down approach, this project will use AI and machine learning methods to develop computer models that will be used to simulate an individual's response to a change in diet. In this case, the project will examine the effect of a Mediterranean diet on cardiovascular disease risk. The simulation results will aim to help better understand how levels of blood triglyceride, a type of fat, respond after switching to the Mediterranean diet. Ultimately, this project has the power to compare the simulations to actual interventions thereby informing AIMINGS and the Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH) consortium how well the computer model is at predicting an individual's response to dietary changes.