A prospective multiethnic HFpEF cohort from California's Central Valley

ABSTRACT This is a new U01 application to establish a Clinical Center (CC) for a prospective multiethnic HFpEF cohort from California central valley for deep phenotyping analyses. The investigative team is diverse, multidisciplinary, and complementary with investigators from School of Medicine, College of Engineering and College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. The investigative team is highly collaborative and has strong track records of previous participation in large-scale research networks involving electronic data from heterogeneous sources, including EHRs, mobile health technologies, and direct-to-participant mailings/web portals. UC Davis Heart Failure Network has one of the most diverse patient population in the country, with a large representation of Latino population from California Central Valley. Our network has an extensive catchman area with a momentous growth in patient volume. The proposed deep phenotyping will take advantage of the newly developed total-body PET scan at UC Davis to decipher the roles of organ-specific variations in metabolic syndrome and inflammation in a diverse and heterogenous HFpEF population. One unique feature of the proposed study is the use of functional connectomics analyses to directly exploit the heterogeneity in the HFpEF population. Indeed, it is the heterogeneity that provides the necessary data needed to derive the interconnections to test the critical network drivers, that will provide eventual insights into potential molecular targets for therapy as well as the unbiased classifications of subtypes of HFpEF. Finally, functional connectomics analyses enable modular “plugin” of new datasets (e.g., microbiomes), derived from deep phenotyping analyses from other CCs in the HeartShare Network. Therefore, our proposed study promises to contribute both technically and conceptually to the overall understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the heterogenous disease in HFpEF.