Abstract

Cardiometabolic diseases (CMD) are a major global burden. Despite the overall improvement in CMD outcomes in the past decades among the general population living in high-income countries such as Europe and North America, large differences in CMD morbidity and mortality exist between migrant and host populations in these countries. In general, migrant populations have worse CMD outcomes than the host populations for reasons that are still unclear. Similarly, CMD pose a major challenge in low-and middle-income countries where most migrant populations originate from. Understanding the drivers behind these disparities may help to mitigate the unequal burden of CMD and to identify new causal pathways that contribute to CMD risk in these population.

This lecture discusses CMD burden and drivers among migrant and non-migrant African populations drawing on lessons learnt from the RODAM study. Furthermore, interventions to address CMD challenges will be discussed using our ongoing Horizon projects such as Generation-H and M-CARE as exemplars.