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Andrew Agbaje, MD, MPH, PhD, FACC, FESC, FAHA, FNYAM

Associate Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Child Health
University of Eastern Finland
Kuopio, Pohjois-Savo, Finland

Professor Andrew is the Principal Investigator of UndeRstanding FITness and Cardiometabolic Health In Little Darlings (urFIT-child). He was awarded the 2024 European Association for the Study of Obesity-Novo Nordisk Foundation New Investigator Award for Childhood Obesity with 45,000 US dollars research grant. He is the inaugural recipient of the 2025 American Society of Nutrition Flemming Quaade Award for Innovation in Childhood Obesity with a 75,000 US dollars research grant. He discovered arterial stiffness as a novel risk factor for paediatric obesity and insulin resistance and identified adolescence as the critical time to interrupt the fat mass-insulin resistance pathologic cycle. ScholarGPS recently recognized as the world's best (number 1) highly ranked scholar in the arterial stiffness specialty out of 10,000 researchers in that field, based on productivity, impact, and quality of his scientific work. He demonstrated light-intensity physical activity as a highly effective antidote for reversing excessive fat deposits induced by childhood sedentariness. He discovered waist circumference-to-height ratio as a specific surrogate for both total body fat mass and trunk fat mass but not muscle mass that could replace body mass index (BMI) in assessing childhood obesity. Subsequently, he was interviewed LIVE on BBC World News TV to discuss the novel findings. Prof. Agbaje developed a freely accessible waist-to-height ratio fat mass calculator and cutpoints that better identify excess adiposity in children, adolescents, and young adults than BMI. https://urfit-child.com/waist-height-calculator/. These cutpoints have been externally validated as predictor of type 2 diabetes, liver steatosis, hypertension, and bone fracture in large sample sized multiracial US, European and Asian population. He recently refuted the four decade BMI-based adiposity rebound theory with waist-to-height ratio, identifying it as a statistical epiphenomenon, and renamed it a lean mass anabolism that comes after a body composition reset. The American Heart Association selected Prof. Agbaje's study for two consecutive years as one of the world's most significant advances in cardiovascular research in 2024 as well as in 2025. He was recently recognized as Rising Star in Preventive Cardiology by the prestigious European Heart Journal (Impact Factor 45). He has published original articles in very high-impact factor journals such as Nature Communications, Diabetes Care, and Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) as a first or single author. He is an Associate Editor in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia, and Muscle (Impact Factor 9.9) and an Associate Editor in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology (Impact factor 10). Prof. Agbaje has been featured by the world's major news outlets, such as CNN, BBC, The Telegraph, The SUN, etc. In the last year, his research findings were published by >2000 news outlets globally with a media reach of 5.5 billion. He has given several international lectures and symposiums across the globe. He currently mentors seven (7) PhD students in his research group as well as medical undergraduates and master's degree students. He gave a TEDx talk on redefining childhood obesity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr-EHkDEAmo

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