The second RECORD Cohort Study wave

We are preparing the second RECORD Study wave. In this context, about 7250 participants will be invited to a second health examination.

Epidemiologic research relies to a large extent on "cohort studies" in which a number of participants are surveyed and examined at a given point in time and followed over time. Cohort studies are based on the idea that to examine if a specific exposure (e.g., an environmental one) is related to a given health problem, it is relevant to measure the exposure at a certain moment in time and assess whether the exposure leads to the incidence of the health problem in the follow-up period among people who were free of this health condition at the beginning of the study. In other words, epidemiologic studies often need data collected at different points in time (i.e., longitudinal data) to attempt to identify causes of health problems.

Inviting the participants to a second health examination will allow us to obtain a second measures of a number of clinical and biological risk factors of cardiovascular diseases that are of particular interest to us (weight and waist circumference, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.). Based on these data, we will be able to investigate changes in these metabolic parameters over a 5 year period and the social and environmental exposures that are associated with the incidence of metabolic conditions over the follow-up.

In this second study wave, survey questionnaires and different assessment tools will be used to better understand the relationships that exist between geographic life environments and cardiovascular health.