Jad Ardakani, Houston Methodist Research Institute - Your Zip-code and the Risk of Type 2 Diabetes

On Houston Methodist Week: Where do you live? Your answer may affect your health.

Jad Ardakani, clinical research fellow, explores why.

Faculty Bio:

Dr. Jad Ardakani is a medical doctor and clinical research fellow in preventive cardiology at the Houston Methodist, where he works under the mentorship of Dr. Sadeer Al-Kindi and Dr. Khurram Nasir. His research focuses on the environmental and social determinants of cardiometabolic disease, leveraging large-scale clinical and geospatial datasets.

His work utilizes the Houston Methodist CVD Learning Health System Registry to examine how residential address–linked environmental exposures influence the development of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He is particularly interested in integrating environmental exposures with precision prevention approaches—including biomarkers, wearable health data, and body composition measures—to improve cardiovascular risk prediction and population-level prevention strategies. His work also includes studying cardiovascular disease burden and risk factors in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) populations, with an emphasis on regional disparities and prevention.

Transcript:

The place you call home may shape your health more than you think. When we talk about Type 2 diabetes, we usually focus on diet, exercise, and family history. But where you live — your neighborhood — may matter just as much.

Our team set out to test that idea. We used a tool called the Climate Vulnerability Index. It scores how exposed a neighborhood is to stressors like extreme heat, storms, and pollution, along with social conditions such as poverty, poor housing, and limited access to care.

We linked that index to the health records of more than one million adults across our health system — none of whom had diabetes when the study began. Then we followed them for up to seven years to see who went on to develop Type 2 diabetes.

The results were striking. Adults living in the most vulnerable neighborhoods had a twenty-three percent higher risk of developing diabetes than those in the least vulnerable areas. And this pattern held even after we accounted for age, sex, race and ethnicity, obesity, blood pressure, cholesterol, and baseline blood sugar.

In other words, the environment around us leaves a measurable mark on our health — one that traditional risk factors alone can miss.

Why does this matter? Because it gives us a new way to see risk. By mapping climate and community vulnerability onto clinical data, we can spot the neighborhoods that need help before disease takes hold, and direct prevention where it will do the most good.

This is one of the largest studies of its kind, but it is really just a starting point. Recognizing that health is shaped not only by our choices, but by the places we live, is the first step toward building healthier, more equitable communities.

Read More:

[National Library of Medicine] - Climate Vulnerability Index and Incident Type 2 Diabetes in a Large Integrated Health Care System