Abstract
The CONSTANCES general-purpose cohort is intended to serve as an epidemiological research infrastructure accessible to the epidemiologic research community with a focus on occupational and social factors, and on chronic diseases and aging. CONSTANCES will also provide useful public health information to the public health authorities since it was designed as a large representative sample of the general French adult population. CONSTANCES is designed as a randomly selected representative sample of French adults aged 18–69 years at inception; 200,000 subjects will be included over a five-year period. At inclusion, the selected subjects are invited to complete questionnaires and to attend a Health Screening Center (HSC) for a comprehensive health examination. A biobank will be set up. The follow-up includes a yearly self-administered questionnaire, and a periodic visit to an HSC. Social and health data are collected from the French national databases. Data collected for participants include social and demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, life events, behaviors, and occupational factors. The health data 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 was set up and will be followed through the same national databases as participants. Inclusion begun at the end of 2012 and more than 82,000 were already included by September 2015. A public call for nested research projects was launched.
Highlights
Research on the causes of diseases in the field of environmental, occupational, social, genetic or pharmacoepidemiology often reveals small relative risks for individual risk factors
Projects are evaluated by the CONSTANCES Scientific
A Charter describes the rules that have been established for using the CONSTANCES infrastructure, regarding legal aspects, data confidentiality and security, ethics, access to the database in the case where only available data are required or when the collection of supplementary data directly from the cohort participants is needed, as well as sharing of these supplementary data, access to the biological and genetic material, responsibilities of the CONSTANCES infrastructure and of external groups, dissemination of data and results, publications and authorship, acknowledgments, follow-up of the project and funding
Summary
Research on the causes of diseases in the field of environmental, occupational, social, genetic or pharmacoepidemiology often reveals small relative risks for individual risk factors. It will serve as an important scientific instrument, in a similar manner to a telescope or a particle accelerator, for example, built not to answer a specific question but rather to help analyze a wide range of scientific problems In this regard, the design of CONSTANCES relied on the experience of the GAZEL Cohort Study, an open general-purpose prospective cohort established in 1989 by our research group which is currently supporting more than 80 different nested research projects on very diverse scientific topics [15,16,17]. The second main objective of the CONSTANCES cohort is to provide useful public health information to the public health authorities and health care regulatory bodies in order to contribute to a better knowledge of the health and health care resource utilization of the French population For this purpose CONSTANCES was designed as a large representative sample of the general French adult population, characterized by a broad coverage of health problems and health determinants
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