Intervention Study: Genetic Risk Communication and Wearables

This study aims to determine the effects of communicating genetic risk for type 2 diabetes (T2D) alone or in combination with goal setting and prompts from a wearable device on objectively measured physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior (SB) in East Asians. It is hypothesized that this combination will lead to significant favorable changes in objectively measured PA and SB, and that such changes will be more likely to be sustained over 6-month follow-up. This study aims to recruit 150 healthy East Asian adults in Hong Kong. At baseline, participants will be invited to visit the research laboratory for measurement of a series of variables including height, body weight, blood pressure and grip strength. Participants will also be invited to complete a set of questionnaires to assess their self-reported PA and SB, fruit and vegetable consumption, smoking status and psychological variables. Blood samples will be collected to analyze key diabetes and cardiovascular disease biochemical markers as well as their estimated genetic risk of T2D. Each individual's unique genetic risk for T2D will be estimated on the basis of established genetic variants associated with T2D specifically for East Asians. Each participant will be asked to wear a Fitbit Charge 4 tracker, an objective activity monitoring device, throughout the entire trial. Participants will be randomly allocated into 3 groups: 1 control and 2 intervention groups. A control group will receive an e-leaflet containing general lifestyle advice for prevention of T2D. An intervention group will receive an estimated genetic risk of T2D, in addition to the e-leaflet. The other intervention group will have a Fitbit step goal set 10% higher than their baseline step count and use prompt functions of the Fitbit tracker, in addition to the genetic risk estimate and e-leaflet. Activity data from the Fitbit will be collected at 4-week post-intervention; information about lifestyle and psychological variables will be assessed through the questionnaires at both immediate and 4-week post-intervention. To determine the longer-term effect of the intervention, participants will be asked to visit the research laboratory 6 months after the intervention to repeat the same set of assessments as baseline, except the blood samples collected at 6-month follow-up are used only to analyze cardiometabolic risk profiles (not genetic risk). Activity levels will also be objectively measured using the Fitbit for 4 weeks.