Canada launches massive population study

Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project will follow 300,000 adults for decades.

Using funding from a $42 million grant from the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, researchers plan to develop a long-term health research platform to look into the effect of genetics and environment on chronic diseases.

The Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project will focus on understanding how lifestyle, environment and genetics contribute to the risk for chronic disease. The partnership is building a prospective platform to study how environmental measures and lifestyle risk factors interact with genetic and epigenetic risk factors.

Recruitment is scheduled to last until March 2012, and participants will be followed both actively and passively for at least 25 years.

The researchers hope to use that information to create better disease prevention protocols. Details of the study were published in a recent issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The project includes both regional and national initiatives. Marilyn J. Borugian, PhD, director of the British Columbia component of the project, said each province contributes to the national project, but local researchers decide which questions are most important in their area.

The overall goal is to get at some of the etiologic or causal factors so we can look at prevention, and those factors might differ by region,” Borugian said in an interview. “Certainly health services and health policy will benefit from the data that come out of this. Even today, this information has value. Some of the questions that we ask have to do with cancer screening behavior; we don’t have to wait to use that.

“We can begin to look at the reasons people tell us —why they do or don’t go to our screening programs. That kind of information helps our health services right away.”

Data collected will vary by province, but the researchers will collect information such as body measurements, eating habits, genetic information, family history and a detailed residential history. They will also collect urine and venous blood, which will be fractionated into plasma, serum, buffy coat and red blood cells. Borugian said participants may also be contacted later for further questioning about exposure of such substances as heavy metals or radon.

The researchers hope that by establishing a participant’s baseline measurements, they will be able to spot disease markers and adjust prevention efforts to reflect information gained in the study.

“As anyone with any chronic disease will tell you, they’d rather not have it in the first place,” Borugian said. “To get at that, you really need to recruit people who are healthy and follow them.”

Although cancer is the focus of the study, Borugian said it is more likely the researchers will first learn about chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, which tend to appear in younger people. One of the highlights of the study is that, through linkages to provincial health utilization data, researchers will be able to study chronic diseases other than cancer in relation to health services use and outcomes.

“If you study healthy people, you can study any outcome,” Borugian said. – by Jason Harris

Borugian MJ. CMAJ. 2010;doi:10.1503/cmaj.091540.