EPIC-CVD is the world’s largest case-cohort study of incident coronary heart disease and stroke events, involving ~25,000 incident CVD cases embedded in the ~520,000-participant pan-European EPIC-CVD prospective cohort study located in 23 centres in 10 countries. To enhance the quality and comparability of data, the CEU has coordinated ascertainment and validation of incident CVD outcomes across centres. CVD cases are being compared with a randomly selected group of ~15,000 referents (ie, a “random subcohort”) established in collaboration with Professor Nick Wareham (who leads a parallel study in EPIC of incident type 2 diabetes that leverages the same sub-cohort).
For ~25,000 incident CVD cases and ~15,000 referents, the CEU has conducted high-density gene arrays (eg, GWAS, Exome chip, Metabochip) and assayed ~80 soluble biomarkers (eg, lipids, metabolic factors, fatty acids, vitamins, antioxidants). The combination of prospective study design, CVD-case richness, and genetic/biomarker detail should enable EPIC-CVD to support a range of efforts related to Mendelian randomisation analysis, and risk prediction and screening.
Funding Sources
For the 2018 Lancet paper on alcohol consumption in the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration, UK Biobank and EPIC-CVD (Wood et al., 2018), the EPIC-CVD Consortium was supported by the following funding sources:
EPIC-CVD was supported by the European Commission Framework 7 (through the EPIC-CVD award; HEALTH-F2-2012-279233), and the European Research Council (through an Advanced Investigator Award to Professor John Danesh; 268834).
The EPIC-CVD Coordinating Centre has been underpinned by grants from the UK Medical Research Council (G0800270 and MR/L003120/1), British Heart Foundation (SP/09/002, RG/08/014 and RG13/13/30194), and National Institute for Health Research (through the National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre).
EPIC-Asturias was supported by the Regional Government of Asturias.
EPIC-Greece was supported by the Hellenic Health Foundation.
EPIC-Oxford was supported by the UK Medical Research Council (MR/M012190/1) and Cancer Research UK (570/A16491).
EPIC-Ragusa was supported by the Sicilian Government, AIRE ONLUS Ragusa, and AVIS Ragusa.
EPIC-Sweden was supported by the Swedish Cancer Society, Swedish Scientific Council and Regional Government of Skåne and Västerbotten (Sweden).
EPIC-Turin was also supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo and the Human Genetics Foundation-Torino (HuGeF).