Sergi Sayols-Baixeras received best abstract award in Clinical Category at IHMC Congress

Sergi Sayols-Baixeras has been awarded with The Global Grants of Gut Health Best Paper Award in Clinical Category for his project entitled “Specific Gut Microbiota Species are Associated with Subclinical Coronary Atherosclerosis Across 8,271 Individuals from the Swedish CArdioPulmonary bioImage Study (SCAPIS) Population-based Cohort”. The project investigates the association between metagenomics species and coronary subclinical atherosclerosis.

Atherosclerosis is the underlying mechanism of cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death worldwide. Gut microbiota has been previously linked to cardiovascular disease, but the current case control studies suffer from limited sample size and are prone to bias of non-comparable medication groups.

The project led by Professor Tove Fall implements cutting-edge sequencing and state-of-the-art analysis techniques to assess the gut microbiome in a Swedish general population-based study, with participants from Malmö and Uppsala. The study is the largest study of its kind to date. The goal is to shed light on the relationship between microbiota species living in the human gut and atherosclerosis process.