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The Nurses’ Health Study is a longitudinal population study aimed initially to examine the relation between the use of oral contraceptives, cigarette smoking, and risk of major illnesses in women, mainly cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Since then, the study broadened to include the evaluation of health consequences of many lifestyle practices, including diet, physical activity, and specific forms of hormone therapy.

The participants are registered nurses, aged 30 to 55 years and married at the time of recruitment in 1976, and who lived in the 11 most populous states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas).

The NLSY 1979 Cohort is a longitudinal project that follows the lives of 12,686 American youth born between 1957 and 1964. The study was intended to be representative of United States residents, both male and female. It observes the life-course experiences of young adults who were finishing their schooling and were making decisions about education and training, entering the labour market, military service, marriage, and having families. Cohort members are now in their 50s and survey content has turned to age-appropriate topics including health and retirement expectations.

Yearly personal interviews were conducted from 1979 – 1986. In 1987, a telephone interview was conducted. Personal interviews resumed in 1988 and continued yearly until 1994. Since 1994, NLSY79 participants have been interviewed in even-numbered years.

In 1999 the Swedish Ministry for Social Affairs promoted and supported a national project aimed at monitoring and evaluating the care-of-the-elderly system in Sweden. To achieve these aims, four longitudinal individual-based data collection describing the aging process and encompassing the care system as whole, has been initiated. This project was named The Swedish National study on Aging and Care (SNAC).

SNAC-K is conducted by the Stockholm Gerontology Research Center in collaboration with Aging Research Center (ARC), Karolinska Institutet.

SNAC-K includes two studies: SNAC-K population study and SNAC-K care system study.

The Stockholm Birth Cohort Study (SBC) was created in 2004/2005 by a probability matching of two comprehensive and longitudinal datasets. The first, the Stockholm Metropolitan study 19531985, consists of all children born in 1953 and living in the Stockholm metropolitan area in 1963. The second, The Swedish Work and Mortality Database 19802009 (WMD), consists of all individuals living in Sweden in 1980 or 1990, and born before 1985. The initiative to create the database was taken by Denny Vågerö at the Centre for Health Equity Studies, CHESS, of Stockholm University/Karolinska Institute and Sten-Åke Stenberg at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University (SOFI). The resulting database provides a 50-year long follow-up of the original 1953 birth cohort.

The Kungsholmen Project is a longitudinal population-based study on ageing and dementia, carried out by the Stockholm Gerontology Research Center in collaboration with Aging Research Center (ARC), Karolinska Institutet.

The project, which started in 1987, has gathered a 12-year long database and offers information on aging from a multidisciplinary perspective. All persons that were born before 1913 and lived in the Kungsholmen district of Stockholm, were invited to participate (a total of 2368 persons on October 1st, 1987, including both community-dwelling and institutionalized persons). Later, the research additionally included all 90+ old subjects living in the St. Göran parish, an adjacent geographical area. The baseline phase and four follow-ups have been completed, with the last phase concluding in the summer of 2000. Time 1 was the only measurement occasion when a two-phase study design was adopted, with an extensive clinical examination performed after a screening phase. At every other occasion, all participants were interviewed by nurses, clinically examined by physicians, and assessed by psychologists.

The original study (1969-73) had five main objectives: (i) to study the relationship of birth weight (BW) and gestational age (GA) to infant mortality and the incidence of congenital defects; (ii) to study maternal blood pressure before and during pregnancy and the incidence of toxaemia; (iii) to assess the effects of parental consanguinity on reproductive outcomes; (iv) to examine the impact of family planning programmes on fertility and (v) to estimate rates of foetal loss, and neonatal, infant and early childhood mortality.1 The subsequent follow-up studies focused on the effects of prenatal factors BW and GA on physical growth and development and mortality during childhood and adolescence.

For the follow-up in young adulthood (1998-2002), the main objective was to study glucose tolerance, insulin resistance and insulin secretion and a range of cardiovascular risk factors (body composition, blood pressure and plasma lipid concentrations) in relation to parental size, neonatal size and childhood growth.

The Prospective Epidemiological Risk Factor (PERF) Study is an ambidirectional population-based study of postmenopausal women set up with the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of the aetiology and pathogenesis of age-related diseases. Participants were recruited from a source population of 8875 women residing in Denmark. The baseline examination (PERF I) comprised 5855 women with mean age of 70.8 years (49.7-88.8) and took place between 1999 and 2001. All subjects have been followed up with registry linkage using population-based national registries. Further, a subcohort was re-invited to attend a follow-up visit between 2013 and 2014 (PERF II). Registry data are available for all baseline participants. From the baseline population, 2103 were enrolled in PERF II.

The Scottish Health Survey (SHeS) provides a detailed picture of the health of the Scottish population in private households and is designed to make a major contribution to the monitoring of health in Scotland.
The series aims to:
estimate the occurrence of particular health conditions
estimate the prevalence of certain risk factors associated with health
look at differences between regions and between subgroups of the population
monitor trends in the population’s health over time
make a major contribution to monitoring progress towards health targets

The Limache cohort was set up to assess the programming and life course events hypotheses in relation to cardiovascular risk factors and chronic respiratory conditions, especially asthma, in the context of an unprecedented economic growth in Chile. The cohort was a representative sample of 1,232 participants born between 1974 and 1978 in the hospital of Limache. The study includes data collected at birth, during the 1st year of life, at 22 to 28 years (collected between 2000 and 2002) and at 32 to 38 years (collected between 2010 and 2012).

This was possible because details were collected for all births in the country including duration of gestation, birthweight and birth length. Limache, a semirural agricultural area relatively near Santiago and close to Viña del Mar and Valparaíso, was chosen because: a birth register in the hospital has been kept since the 1970s; paediatric clinical records were kept in the local hospital ; and there was demographic information that emigration from this area was low so that we would be able to find most participants born in the 1970s still living in Limache and in Olmué, a neighbouring area.

The Maastricht Study is an extensive phenotyping study that focuses on the etiology of type 2 diabetes, its classic complications (cardiovascular disease, nephropathy, neuropathy and retinopathy), and its emerging comorbidities, including cognitive decline, depression, and gastrointestinal, respiratory and musculoskeletal diseases. The study uses advanced state-of-the-art imaging techniques and extensive biobanking to determine health status in a population-based cohort of 10,000 individuals that is enriched with type 2 diabetes participants. The Maastricht Study is expected to become one of the most extensive phenotyping studies in both the general population and type 2 diabetes participants worldwide.

The Maastricht Study allows researchers access to data to encourage publications of high quality papers and presentations. External researchers (those without an MUMC or UM affiliation) can only submit a research proposal in cooperation with a member of the Maastricht Study Management Team and/or Maastricht Study Participating researchers.