Vydiant

09/16/2022

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.

07/27/2021

The U.S. National Academy of Science's Food and Nutrition Board has organized "Challenges and Opportunities for Precision and Personalized Nutrition: A Workshop" to be held virtually on August 10 - 12 from 10 a.m. to 1 pm (-4 GMT). More details and agenda are:

Learn more from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

07/23/2021

How do we develop personalized recommendations, products, and treatments given that most research studies generate population attributable risks? The Journal of Nutrition invited a commentary on n-of-1 research study designs (https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxab243) based on this research study: https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxab227. Comments welcomed!

Personalization is one of the dominant zeitgeists of the new millennium, driven by individuals who demand the right information or product or service at the rig

06/10/2021

Dietary patterns offer a perspective different from the traditional single nutrient intake analysis and may be used to formulate more comprehensive dietary recommendations for health and disease prevention or treatment. Our team, led by Jacqueline Monteiro, found dietary patterns affecting zinc and PUFA levels and identified serum linoleic/dihomo-γ-linolenic ratio (LA/DGLA) as a potential biomarker of zinc status: https://lnkd.in/gT_rMVr.

06/07/2021

Our latest publication from the micronutrient intervention study in Brazilian children and teens (https://lnkd.in/eBdHA93). This new report identified and used polygenic risk scores for plasma vitamin B12 levels to stratify individuals into low, mild, and high risk for B12 insufficiencies. See: https://lnkd.in/eJwr64f

Polymorphisms in genes related to the metabolism of vitamin B12 haven’t been examined in a Brazilian population. To (a) determine the correlation between the local genetic ancestry components and vitamin B12 levels using ninety B12-related genes; (b) determine associations between these genes and ...

05/20/2021

Vydiant's Chief Technology Officer, Corrado Priami, has been appointed Director of the Digital Health Program of the Italian National Interuniversity Consortium for Informatics. The mission of the Digital Health National Lab is to integrate many different skills and data types usually siloed to enhance healthcare research and operations with actionable tools that improve people's health and quality of life. The consortium on Digital Health consists of 42 universities across Italy.


https://www.consorzio-cini.it/index.php/en/national-laboratories/digital-health

11/15/2020

Providing guidance to individuals to maintain health or reduce symptoms of chronic diseases is challenging because much of evidence base comes from evaluating differences between groups of people (e.g., case-control studies). A new approach is based on N-of-1 designs based on real world patient digital data. A recent review by some of the leaders of this effort is found here:

Blog post about Frontiers research topic 'Creating Evidence from Real World Patient Digital Data'. Written by Jane Nikles, Eric J. Daza, Suzanne McDonald, Eric Hekler and Nicholas Schork

10/22/2020

Vydiant has updated their website to better reflect our activities and missions. Check it out: vydiant.com

11/03/2019

Many of us consumers are confused about the conflicting trends in nutritional advice: low fat, high protein, low carbohydrate, vegan, no multivitamins, yes multivitamins, and who knows what to make of ~80,000 dietary supplements (https://tinyurl.com/y2fe5pqu) currently on the U.S. market. This confusion results in part from research strategies and methods that do not account for the complexity of naturally-occurring chemicals in foods, the intricacies of genetic variability, and the impact of social determinants of health.

Although everyone involved in biomedical research is responsible for the current situation, journals have a special responsibility as gatekeepers for approving and disseminating study results. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (https://tinyurl.com/y2vvyo4o) is sharpening its focus by introducing 4 new sections: (i) great debates in nutrition to address major controversies, (ii) nutrigenomics and precision nutrition, both systems sciences, to better translate results to individuals, (iii) food systems and the environment to provide evidence to sustain nutrition as the climate changes accelerate, and (iv) women’s nutrition beyond pregnancy and lactation that acknowledges differences in physiology between males and females.

The AJCN plans are remarkably similar to the more granular suggestions for propelling the shift from reductionism to systems nutrition published in Genes&Nutrition in 2017 (https://tinyurl.com/y2lepum3). Editors at both journals recognized, as does the constructive criticism of others (https://tinyurl.com/y3ahh72t), that the status quo must change to produce more reliable evidence for individual and public health.

07/07/2019

The new meme in nutrition research is the effect of “ultra-processed foods” (UPF) on health. An excellent review (in https://tinyurl.com/y4xdyj5f) discusses the NOVA categorization of unprocessed, processed culinary ingredients, processed (PF), and UPF (https://tinyurl.com/ycmnr7og). The first randomized control trial (https://tinyurl.com/y4bxyfjn) generated widespread media attention and spirited debates (eg., https://tinyurl.com/y67mtyyn & https://tinyurl.com/y5g4vr7v) focused on extrapolation of results from short term studies to long term health outcomes.

Comparing foods based on energy, chemical content, fiber, and meal compositions is difficult because of the complexity and the lack of data on physiological responses, regardless of the amount of processing. Since many in the general public are confused about nutrition recommendations, simplifying messages may be of help: unless the simple message adds to confusion. More rigorous and standard definitions for food and nutrition research and communication are fundamental to the development of healthy, safe, inexpensive, shelf stable foods. A complete food system will be required to meet the nutritional needs of a growing world population, especially as climate changes and chronic diseases continues to increase.

06/24/2019

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.

06/19/2019

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.

ABSTRACTBackground. Nutrients are added to the diet through fortification/enrichment and dietary supplements (DSs). Meeting the US Dietary Reference Intakes (D