Throwback to the EUR LIVE Summer School 2023: Metabolic disorders & vulnerability, a Public Health issue

SUMMER SCHOOL 2023

The decade 2020-2030 has been designated by the United Nations as the Decade of Healthy Ageing. Marked by the impacts of the health crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges of living longer met with the rise in vulnerabilities due to non-linear aging, coupled with the increase in pollution and its effects on metabolism. This global reality have repercussions in all aspects of society, including health, public policies, and long-term care.

Vulnerabilities are on the rise, facing the capacity to adapt to the impacts of climate change, such as the reduction in the nutritional quality of agricultural yields, the increase in hyperthermia, and the degradation of water quality, as reported by the assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, February 2023).

As part of its research-oriented training objective, the EUR LIVE Summer School focused on "Metabolic Disorders & Vulnerability: A Public Health Issue." In cooperation with the European project CARDIATEAM and the FHU SENEC, the event brought together researchers from several disciplines and count on the participation of colleagues from the IEP de Fontainebleau and the "Convention Citoyenne Étudiante - CCE UPEC."

Diabetes, the modeling of metabolic pathologies, sleep, its associated determinants, and cardiovascular risk trajectories with a focus on new statistical approaches and the patient's perspective were some of the topics of the morning session. It concluded with an exceptional lecture on telomere biology and its impact on metabolic pathologies such as obesity and diabetes by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn (UCSF), Nobel Prize in Physiology 2009 (find Professor Blackburn's Keynote lecture here).

The afternoon session continued with presentations on the institutionalization of obesity prevention policies within the framework of the four national nutrition health plans (PNNS) implemented in France since 2001. 
Finally, the presentation of the 'Convention Citoyenne Étudiante - CCE' opened new perspectives regarding metabolic disorders, public health policies, and environmental challenges.

The Summer School 2023 concluded with an exchange on the transdisciplinary approach to vulnerability between Geneviève Derumeaux, scientific director of EUR LIVE, and Yves Palau, director of Institut d'Études Politiques Fontainebleau (UPEC).

Here below some highlights of the lectures:

• Diabetes: the current situation in France 

S Hadjadj – l’institut du thorax (Université de Nantes) 

Type 2 diabetes is a condition whose prevalence is on constant rise. It is associated with changes in lifestyle, including smoking and pollution, socio-psychological inequalities, ageing and obesity. Epidemiological data on diabetes and its complications provide a solid basis for understanding that this disease is a major public health issue for the years to come. It constitutes a real model for chronic diseases. The way we will handle with diabetes will be an important indication for the sustainability of our health-care system. 

• Diabetes and cardiovascular risk prediction 

C Lang (University of Dundee, UK) 

Individuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) face higher risks for macro- and microvascular complications than their non-diabetic counterparts. The concept of precision medicine in T2DM aims to optimise treatment decisions for individual patients to reduce the risk of major diabetic complications. In this context, risk prediction models have been proposed to estimate an individual’s risk for relevant complications based on individual risk profiles. In this talk that focuses on cardiovascular risk prediction, we will discuss the development of cardiovascular prediction models, including the selection of predictors based on their longitudinal association with the outcome of interest and their discriminatory ability that has the potential to allow estimation of an individual’s absolute risk of cardiovascular complications. However, many of these risk scores have not been validated in external cohorts or have been shown to over- or underestimate risk in populations other than those in which they were derived from, highlighting the challenges related to the clinical applications and implementation of developed predictions models to optimise medical decision making. 

• Modélisation des pathologies métaboliques 

M Ibberson (SIB, Lausanne)  

Nowadays many different types of data are generated or collected from patients, ranging from clinical observations to deep phenotyping and various -omics technologies. The challenge is to bring all these data together into meaningful statistical models to help predict how a patient will respond to treatment, or how a disease will progress for example. There is also the complication that often these data reside in silos due to legal or ethical restrictions requiring us to find innovative ways to analyse them. In this talk I will give examples of some simple models have been used to gain insights into diabetes related conditions and how we are trying to address the problems of data silos to maximize the value of distributed datasets. 

• Psychiatric pathologies and metabolic risk

O Godin (Research Unit 955, IMRB) 

Life expectancy has been estimated to be about 10 and 11 years shorter for individuals with severe psychiatric disorders compared to the general population without mental illness. Accumulating evidence suggest that comorbid cardiovascular disorders are one of the most frequent causes of mortality in this population, with a frequency well above that of suicide. In this talk, we will review frequency, potential causes and consequences of this high CVDs comorbidity in individuals with severe psychiatric disorders.

• The student citizen convention (UPEC): decision-making process and the food system 

E Frenkiel (LIPHA, IEP Fontainebleau)

Emilie Frenkiel, Hajar El Karmouni. La convention citoyenne étudiante : quel impact sur l’horizontalisation du processus décisionnel et le système alimentaire de l’université Paris Est Créteil ?. Technologie et innovation, 2023, 8 (4), ⟨10.21494/ISTE.OP.2023.1009⟩. ⟨hal-04211293⟩

A look back in photos :

The program is available : here