Cohort profile: the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study (Health 2020)
Date
2017
Authors
Milne, R.L.
Fletcher, A.S.
MacInnis, R.J.
Hodge, A.M.
Hopkins, A.H.
Bassett, J.K.
Bruinsma, F.J.
Lynch, B.M.
Dugué, P.A.
Jayasekara, H.
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Journal article
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International Journal of Epidemiology, 2017; 46(6):1757i-1757i
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Abstract
The Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study (MCCS), also known as Health 2020, was planned in the late 1980s and established in the early 1990s as an omnibus cohort to investigate prospectively the roles of diet and lifestyle in causing cancer and other non-communicable diseases. It was developed contemporaneously with the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort 2 at a time when diet and nutrition were considered important to cancer causation,3 but detailed information adequate to inform prevention was scant. The literature was dominated by inconsistent evidence generated by a large number of small case-control studies which had problems not only with statistical power and dietary assessment but also, more importantly, with forms of information bias to which such studies are prone. A prospective design was chosen to reduce these biases. We also considered that a contributing factor to the modest strengths of association between dietary factors and cancer observed by previous cohort studies, might be related to the limited range of dietary intakes within a given population. We sought ways in which we might address this and, as Melbourne had a relatively large number of migrants from Italy and Greece with distinct dietary and lifestyle differences from the majority of British descent, we deliberately targeted them for recruitment in order to broaden the range of observations of the measured lifestyle risk factors.
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Copyright 2017 The Author(s)
Access Condition Notes: This article is free to read online