Abstract
Chronic diseases result from a combination of individual genetic predisposition and exposure to environmental risk factors. The joint assessment of exposure and disease outcome is the key to accelerate breakthroughs in environmental health research. The selection of reliable and unbiased indicators are necessary to carry out high quality research but remains a big challenge. Large population cohorts and biobanks can provide high quality data for the assessment of both exposure and health effects. The CARTaGENE (CaG) cohort is the largest prospective health study in Québec. Since 2007, CaG recruited 43,000 participants, aged 40-69 years at baseline. CaG is characterized by a wealth of collected data on each participant: health questionnaire (lifestyle, mental health, etc.), physical measures (blood pressure, spirometry, electrocardiogram, etc.), food frequency questionnaire, residential and occupational histories, biochemical measures (eg. lipids, glycated hemoglobin, creatinine), and genotyping data. The CaG biobank contains biosamples (blood, plasma, urine, etc,) for more than 30,000 participants. These biosamples allow for the measurements of additional biomarkers (exposure or effect) for specific purposes. CaG databases are linked to administrative health databases which are of great value to inform about health care use and, along with prospective follow-up questionnaires, enable to collect data on a continuous manner to identify temporal variations. CaG is fully integrated in the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project, which represents 300,000 participants and more than 150,000 biological samples available for health research. CaG was created to support the scientific community in identifying the determinants of chronic diseases of environmental and/or genetic origin. Longitudinal population cohort such as CaG offers very powerful tools for environmental epidemiology studies.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
