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Metabolites are intermediates or end products of biochemical processes involved in both health and disease. Here, we take advantage of the well-characterized Cooperative Health Research in South Tyrol (CHRIS) study to perform an exome-wide association study (ExWAS) on absolute concentrations of 175 metabolites in 3294 individuals. To increase power, we imputed the identified variants into an additional 2211 genotyped individuals of CHRIS. In the resulting dataset of 5505 individuals, we identified 85 single-variant genetic associations, of which 39 have not been reported previously. Fifteen associations emerged at ten variants with >5-fold enrichment in CHRIS compared to non-Finnish Europeans reported in the gnomAD database. For example, the CHRIS-enriched ETFDH stop gain variant p.Trp286Ter (rs1235904433-hexanoylcarnitine) and the MCCC2 stop lost variant p.Ter564GlnextTer3 (rs751970792-carnitine) have been found in patients with glutaric acidemia type II and 3-methylcrotonylglycinuria, respectively, but the loci have not been associated with the respective metabolites in a genome-wide association study (GWAS) previously. We further identified three gene-trait associations, where multiple rare variants contribute to the signal. These results not only provide further evidence for previously described associations, but also describe novel genes and mechanisms for diseases and disease-related traits.
This study investigates the relations between working environment and teachers' job satisfaction, perceived work‐related stress, as well as work‐related self‐efficacy. The sample consisted of 226 mathematics teachers from German secondary schools. About 55% were female and they had been teaching for 13 years on average. We used self‐reported measures to assess how teachers perceived their working environment (regarding autonomy, feedback, and social support by colleagues), administrative leadership and teachers' work‐related self‐efficacy, as well as job satisfaction and work‐related stress. Structural equation modeling demonstrates that teachers' job satisfaction and stress were significantly associated with self‐efficacy (moderate to large effects) and an administrative leadership at the corresponding schools (small to moderate effects). The effect of social support on teachers' job satisfaction and stress was fully mediated by teachers' self‐efficacy. Our findings underscore the importance of self‐efficacy and a positive working environment for teachers' job satisfaction and stress.
For the goal of individualized medicine, it is critical to have clinical phenotypes at hand which represent the individual pathophysiology. However, for most of the utilized phenotypes, two individuals with the same phenotype assignment may differ strongly in their underlying biological traits. In this paper, we propose a definition for individualization and a corresponding statistical operationalization, delivering thereby a statistical framework in which the usefulness of a variable in the meaningful differentiation of individuals with the same phenotype can be assessed. Based on this framework, we develop a statistical workflow to derive individualized phenotypes, demonstrating that under specific statistical constraints the prediction error of prediction scores contains information about hidden biological traits not represented in the modeled phenotype of interest, allowing thereby internal differentiation of individuals with the same assigned phenotypic manifestation. We applied our procedure to data of the population-based Study of Health in Pomerania to construct a refined definition of obesity, demonstrating the utility of the definition in prospective survival analyses. Summarizing, we propose a framework for the individualization of phenotypes aiding personalized medicine by shifting the focus in the assessment of prediction models from the model fit to the informational content of the prediction error.