Overweight and obesity are associated with many major health consequences and increased all-cause mortality. The worldwide prevalence of obesity has nearly tripled since 1975 and is considered a global epidemic and worldwide public health crisis. Whereas the prevalence of overweight is higher in men than in women, the prevalence of obesity is higher in women than in men. Detailed information on the prevalence of overweight and obesity in men and women during their adult life course in the Netherlands is lacking.
This project is a kick off project of the collaboration between 11 Dutch cohort studies.
The current challenges in population health are extremely complex and diverse, due to rapidly growing numbers of multimorbidity, emerging exposures like the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and population aging. Dutch cohort studies to address such challenges do exist, but are disparate, disconnected and fragmented. Within the Netherlands Cohort Consortium (NCC), we will align study procedures for future data collections and harmonize existing high quality health science data. This application will ensure the standardization of 11 cohort studies achieving sufficient power to study the complex web of exposures that determine population health.
The Netherlands Cohorts Consortium (NCC) consists of world famous Dutch scientists, and will build a longitudinal, representative, and ready-to-use national cohort infrastructure. We will develop novel and aligned data collection strategies and implement causal inference methodology to enable scientific breakthroughs in population-based prevention of common diseases. The NCC infrastructure is of major value to increase our knowledge on maintaining health and vitality into old age. NCC will be able to address the complexity and interrelations of the environment with (psycho)social, biomedical functioning and disease, to fuel the development of new public health preventions.
The NCC infrastructure provides unprecedented coverage of exposures across multiple levels, spanning over four decades and multiple generations. Longitudinal, deep-phenotyping data regarding (psycho)social and biomedical functioning, and (socio)-economic data from 11 population-representative cohort studies, among ~440.000 Dutch individuals, are combined. Moreover, alignment of new data collection will allow evaluations and monitoring at a national scale. The NCC infrastructure covers geographic areas/provinces across the country (from rural to urban), socio-economic layers (low to high SES/education level), and the diversity of ethnic/cultural backgrounds. It will facilitate multidisciplinary research into the prediction, prevention, aetiology and course of diseases, and translation into population-based prevention measures.
Thus, NCC creates an accessible research infrastructure of global reputation, facilitating new discoveries of local and international importance, and promote outstanding and integrated scientific health research. In addition, this rich infrastructure will be flexible in the evaluation and monitoring of emerging health challenges and can guide health care policy as it is tailored to the Dutch societal and health care context.