DERIVE – Development of Riboflavin biomarkers to relate dietary sources with status, gene-nutrient Interactions and Validated health Effects in adult cohorts – & VALID – Valerolactones and healthy Ageing: LInking Dietary factors, nutrient biomarkers, metabolic status and inflammation with cognition in older adults

DERiVE: Sub-optimal riboflavin status may be more widespread than is generally recognised across the developed world, because of the reliance on dietary data only in nutrition surveys, without biomarker evidence. DERIVE will address this gap by developing accessible riboflavin biomarkers for use in population surveys globally, and by demonstrating important functional, gene-nutrient and health effects of optimal riboflavin status in Canadian, Irish and UK cohorts.

The proposed study will access bio-banked blood samples (collected under the JINGO initiative http://www.ucd.ie/jingo/) and data from one the most comprehensive dietary surveys in the EU, the Irish National Adult Nutrition Survey (www.iuna.net) as well as bio-banked specimen and data from the BC Generations Project (www.bcgenerationsproject.ca), part of the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project, a major research platform for the study of disease causation.

VALID: Polyphenols, particularly procyanidins (abundant in foods such as tea, cocoa, grapes, nuts and berries), may be beneficial in maintaining better cognitive function in ageing, but investigating their role in relation to health is hampered by the lack of robust biomarkers of dietary intake. We will validate novel plasma biomarkers of procyanidin-rich foods and link them with inflammation, metabolic health and cognition in an ageing European population.

VALID draws on the TUDA cohort, a unique resource on 5200 adults aged 60-102 years recruited from the UK and Ireland, providing a range of biomarkers and health measures. Apart from performing new analysis on bio-banked TUDA samples, we will access 'TUDA 5+', a follow-up study of 1000 participants from the original cohort 5 years after initial investigation, to determine the role of procyanidin-rich foods in preventing cognitive decline over a 5-year follow-up period.