Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Prospective cohorts represent an essential design for epidemiological studies and allow for the study of the combined effects of lifestyle, environment, genetic predisposition, and other risk factors on a large variety of disease endpoints. Although designed as a "general-purpose" cohort with very broad coverage, it will particularly focus on occupational and social determinants of health, and on aging.
At inclusion, the selected subjects will be invited to fill a questionnaire and to attend a Health Screening Center HSC for a comprehensive health examination: weight, height, blood pressure, electrocardiogram, vision, auditory, spirometry, and biological parameters; for those aged 45 years and older, a specific work-up of functional, physical, and cognitive capacities will be performed.
A biobank will be set up. The follow-up includes a yearly self-administered questionnaire, and a periodic visit to an HSC. Social and work-related events and health data will be collected from the French national retirement, health and death databases. The data that will be collected include social and demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, life events, behaviors, and occupational factors. The health data will cover a wide spectrum: self-reported health scales, reported prevalent and incident diseases, long-term chronic diseases and hospitalizations, sick-leaves, handicaps, limitations, disabilities and injuries, healthcare utilization and services provided, and causes of death.
To take into account non-participation at inclusion and attrition throughout the longitudinal follow-up, a cohort of non-participants will be set up and followed through the same national databases as participants. A field-pilot was performed in in seven HSCs, which included about 3, subjects; it showed a satisfactory structure of the sample and a good validity of the collected data. The constitution of the full eligible sample is planned during the last trimester of , and the cohort will be launched at the beginning of Large-scale, prospective observational cohort studies that include several hundreds of thousands of individuals and that incorporate personal, social, lifestyle, occupational and environmental data as well as biobanks of blood and other biological specimens have become essential resources for studies on the causes of and major risk factors for many diseases.
This cohort is intended to serve as an "open epidemiologic laboratory" widely accessible to the epidemiologic research scientific community; due to the open access provided to the community of researchers, it will be possible to conduct projects on a variety of scientific questions.
