The European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) is an ongoing multi-centre prospective cohort study designed to investigate the relationship between nutrition and cancer, with the potential for studying other diseases as well. The study currently includes 519 978 participants (366 521 women and 153 457 men, mostly aged 35-70 years) in 23 centres located in 10 European countries, to be followed for cancer incidence and cause-specific mortality for several decades. At enrolment, which took place between 1992 and 2000 at each of the different centres, information was collected through a non-dietary questionnaire on lifestyle variables and through a dietary questionnaire addressing usual diet. Anthropometric measurements were performed and blood samples taken, from which plasma, serum, red cells and buffy coat fractions were separated and aliquoted for long-term storage, mostly in liquid nitrogen. To calibrate dietary measurements, a standardised, computer-assisted 24-hour dietary recall was implemented at each centre on stratified random samples of the participants, for a total of 36 900 subjects. EPIC represents the largest single resource available today world-wide for prospective investigations on the aetiology of cancers (and other diseases) that can integrate questionnaire data on lifestyle and diet, biomarkers of diet and of endogenous metabolism (e.g. hormones and growth factors) and genetic polymorphisms. First results of case-control studies nested within the cohort are expected early in 2003. The present paper provides a description of the EPIC study, with the aim of simplifying reference to it in future papers reporting substantive or methodological studies carried out in the EPIC cohort.

These data suggest that both general adiposity and abdominal adiposity are associated with the risk of death and support the use of waist circumference or waist-to-hip ratio in addition to BMI in assessing the risk of death.

European Community's Seventh Framework Programme.

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Objective To examine whether adherence to the modified Mediterranean diet, in which unsaturates were substituted for monounsaturates, is associated with longer life expectancy among elderly Europeans. Design Multicentre, prospective cohort study. Setting Nine European countries

We conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study (GWAS) of pancreatic cancer, a cancer with one of the poorest survival rates worldwide. Initially, we genotyped 558,542 single nucleotide polymorphisms in 1,896 incident cases and 1,939 controls drawn from twelve prospective cohorts plus one hospital-based case-control study. In a combined analysis adjusted for study, sex, ancestry and five principal components that included an additional 2,457 cases and 2,654 controls from eight case-control studies, we identified an association between a locus on 9q34 and pancreatic cancer marked by the single nucleotide polymorphism, rs505922 (combined P=5.37 × 10-8; multiplicative per-allele odds ratio (OR) 1.20; 95% CI 1.12-1.28). This SNP maps to the first intron of the ABO blood group gene. Our results are consistent with earlier epidemiologic evidence suggesting that people with blood group O may have a lower risk of pancreatic cancer than those with groups A or B.

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