Medical Biobank
Adress: Umeå University Hospital, 901 85 Umeå
Telephone: +46 90 785 15 40
Fax: +46 90 785 26 42
The Medical Biobank is mainly based on three cohorts:
These sub-cohorts together is named Northern Sweden Health and Disease Study
Cohort (North Health).
Originally, the Västerbotten Intervention program (VIP) is a long-term project
intended for health promotion of the population of Västerbotten. All individuals
40, 50 and 60 years of age in the population of the county are invited for
screening (approx. 254.000 inhabitants). They are asked to complete a
questionnaire concerning various lifestyle factors including diet. They are also
asked to donate a separate blood sample to the Medical Biobank for freeze
storage for later research purposes.
The project started in 1985 and the cohort
covered in December 2002, 74,000 individuals, of whom 67,000 had donated blood
samples. The material is supplemented with population based samples from a local
mammary screening (44,000 sampling occasions, 25,700 unique individuals) and
from the Northern Sweden MONICA Project (11,500 sampling occasions, 7,500 unique
individuals). The total cohort contains at the moment 85.000 unique individuals
with 130.000 sampling occasions. The VIP and MONICA cohorts are population based
and the mammary screening cohort are “nearly” population based.
Follow-up:
Umea University, The Medical Biobank Foundation and the County Council of Västerbotten.
The Medical Biobank has been positioned as a national and international resource for scientific research and scientists from different countries are also applying for samples and information from the database. In order to maintain public trust in the health care system and for epidemiology, all applications must be:
Rules and guidelines for an access application can be sent after contacting the Database Co-ordinator Åsa Ågren.
Life-Style Questionnaire: Every attending subject is asked to answer a
questionnaire, which in the VIP and MONICA-projects includes questions about
education, occupation/working conditions, daily habits including smoking, diet
etc and in the mammary screening cohort on reproductive conditions. The dietary
questionnaire has been validated twice. The data from the questionnaires, as
well as from results from the biobank, are kept in a database for future
research purposes. The questionnaires in the VIP and the MONICA project are
optically read.
Measurements: Blood Pressure, Anthropometry, Glucose Tolerance Test, Blood
Lipids
Blood Samples: The attendants are asked for their willingness to donate a sample
of 20-ml whole blood for future analyses. The sample is taken after 4 hours of
fasting or in the morning after an over night fasting (most samples) in the VIP
and MONICA cohorts. The 20-ml sample is divided into 10 subsamples consisting of
6 plasma, 2 leukocyte (buffy coat) and 2 erythrocyte samples. All material is
frozen at -80º C. The organisation of the bank is elaborated with specially
trained staff and an organisation of transport-, storage- and security
facilities. For DNA handling a specialised laboratory has been built up.
End-points: Mortality, Cancer events, Cardiovascular events, Other morbidity,
Other registry-based follow-up
Registries: At regular intervals the cohort is scanned for incident myocardial
infarctions (MI) and stroke utilising the Northern Sweden MONICA registry and
for cancer using the regional cancer registry. In the future the same procedure
will be applied also on other registries e.g. diabetes, osteoporosis, dementia.
Yes
Co-ordination of centralised databases and functional genomics: The basic
concept of the Medical Biobank is to develop, combine and utilise the power of
several cohorts. Several groups of scientists representing different research
areas, ' universities and countries are participating. Research in functional
genomics combined with bioinformatics and biocomputing has high priority for the
future. To get sufficient materials various pooling projects (e.g. the MORGAM
project, the EPIC project) are ongoing.
Baseline examination, Life-Style Questionnaire (Heredity, Occupation, Social-economy, Previous diseases, Medication, non-prescript drugs, Dietary habits), information attached to fractionated blood samples and extracted DNA, results of previous studies.
All content is © 2003 The National Biobank Program
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