Metabolic traits in obesity and normal BMI in industrialised countries: a multi-country analysis of national population-based studies

NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) Code and Data Sharing

This repository contains code and data used to generate the results of the publication "Metabolic traits in obesity and normal BMI in industrialised countries: a multi-country analysis of national population-based studies".

Codes are provided for transparency and in the spirit of scientific collaboration. 
We will not be able to answer questions about the details of these codes.

Contents Guide

The Data folder contains:  

• NCD_RisC_Lancet_2026_input_data.xlsx The list of data sources used in the study, together with contact information for data access.
• Country_List.csv The list of the seven countries/territories in the study and their ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes.

The Scripts folder contains: 

• Run 'master.R' to reproduce the results in the paper.
• '1_age_standardisation.R', '2.1_prep.R', '2.2_predictions.R' and '3_meta.R' are four analysis scripts called in 'master.R'.
• 'functions.R' contains functions used in the other scripts.

The renv folder contains:

• 'activate.R' starts and activates the renv used to produce the results presented in the paper.
• 'settings.json' stores configuration rules for how renv behaves.

Contact

• For more information about the paper or the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, please see www.ncdrisc.org or contact ncdrisc@imperial.ac.uk.

Reproducibility

• All scripts were tested and run using R version 4.5.2.
• To run the package for the first time, please follow the installation guide below: 
  1. Install R 4.5.2 from https://cran.r-project.org/
     • For Windows version, go to https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/old/
  2. Open a new R console and set working directory to the folder of this package
  3. Run install.packages("renv") if not already installed
  4. Run renv::restore()
     • Choose option 2 "Do not activate the project and use current library paths" if prompted
     • Follow the prompt to install relevant R packages. Typical install time is <5 minutes.

1. NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Metabolic traits in obesity and normal BMI in industrialised countries: a multi-country analysis of national population-based studies. Lancet 2026.