(P03-054-23) Validation of Dietary Biomarkers in Multi-Ethnic Asian Population

Objectives: Dietary biomarkers reflecting our habitual food intakes are explored largely in European and American populations. However, the food metabolome is highly complex, with its composition varying to regional diet and culture. We aimed to i) identify and validate dietary biomarker panels that objectively reflects food intakes in a multi-ethnic Asian population, and ii) develop respective metabolite scores to improve accuracy of assessing association with clinical risks.

Methods: In the HELIOS cohort (n=8,391, 30-84 years old, Chinese:Malay:Indian=69:12:19), we estimated dietary data from validated FFQ comprising of 169 foods, and analysed fasting plasma samples using Metabolon DiscoveryHD4 platform. We determined partial correlations between metabolites and foods, adjusted for age, sex and ethnicity. We developed metabolite panels for respective foods via elastic net regression (for feature selection) and ridge regression (derive penalised weights), and built composite scores based on those metabolites in a training set (n= 5,809), adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, income and education.

Results: Amongst 1055 detected metabolites, 154 metabolites (80% known identity) correlated with 39 foods (r=0.15-0.58, FDR-p < 0.05). We observed novel correlations for ethnic-relevant foods, processed foods, fruits, red meat, fish, crustaceans and mollusks, reflecting distinct dietary habits within this multi-ethnic cohort. As a proof of concept focused on fish intake, a candidate panel of 9 metabolites improved variance (adjusted-R²) of predicted intake by 21% in a test set (n=2,478). A fish composite score was more strongly associated with fasting glucose (standardised β=-0.03(p=1.4e^-2) vs 0.01(2.3e^-01)), HOMA-IR (-0.1(1.5e^-22) vs -0.01(1.7e^-1)) and fat-mass-index (-0.1(3.2e^-44) vs -0.02(2.9e^-2)) compared to self-reported intake.
Metabolite panels for other foods are ongoing.

Conclusions: In this study, we showed the application of a dietary biomarker panel, representative of various food intakes in complex diets, is feasibly and clinically relevant in our free-living multi-ethnic population.

Funding Sources: Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, National Healthcare Group and National Medical Research Council, Ministry of Health, Singapore.