Recent integrations of metabolomic measures into long-running cohort studies have enabled new insights from old data. These have helped reveal in more detail the metabolic effects of modifiable exposures such as body fatness and the metabolic profile of cardiometabolic disease susceptibility at different life stages. This talk will summarise recent insights gained into the metabolic impact of early life body fatness, body muscle, and physical activity from body scanning and targeted metabolomic measures in the multi-generational Children of the 90s study. Recent findings into the early metabolic features in childhood of genetic liability to adult type 2 diabetes will also be discussed, along with the implications of findings for disease prevention.

Joshua Bell is an epidemiologist and Elizabeth Blackwell Institute (EBI) Early Career Fellow within the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on cardiometabolic health and applying causal inference methods to inform the prevention of avoidable disease. His PhD at UCL focused on metabolically healthy obesity and type 2 diabetes risk using clinical measures from the Whitehall II Study of British civil servants; this followed an MSc in social epidemiology at UCL and a BSc in psychology, neuroscience and behaviour at McMaster University, Canada.