2.1. Participants

For our study, we used data from the UK Biobank, obtained from a prospective cohort study of a middle-aged population in the United Kingdom and for which the procedures have been described elsewhere (http://www.ukBiobank.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/UK-Biobank-Protocol.pdf, accessed on 5 July 2021). Approval for these experiments was obtained from the North-West Multi-center Research Ethics Committee and written informed consent obtained from each participant. Briefly, participants went to one of 22 assessment centers throughout UK for data collection, with baseline data obtained from 502,505 participants. Our study included the data obtained at the first assessment visit from this cohort (2006–2010). The sample analyzed in each analysis consisted of subjects with all valid independent variables and dependent variables in each analysis.