Swiss Cohort & Biobank – The White Paper

Abstract

A large Swiss Cohort with 100,000+ representative participants of all ages is the backbone of public health related research and an essential point of reference for health systems steering, personalized health, and clinical research. The national multidisciplinary public health sciences community of SSPH+ and the national society of public health professionals-the Swiss Society for Public Health-assembled an ad hoc Steering & Writing Committee led by Prof. Nicole Probst-Hensch, Swiss TPH to publish a White Paper in fall 2022. This is a further complementary step in the national move toward better health data in Switzerland and specifically toward a large population-based cohort and biobank, with its many milestones, including the cohort pilot study of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), largely based on the protocols of the only national population-based cohort and biobank of Switzerland (SAPALDIA) running successfully since >30 years as well as draft questionnaires of HBM4EU, Food frequency questionnaires of MenuCH, worker exposure questionnaires, and others. Some protocols have been developed specifically the cohort pilot, e.g., all blood and urine sampling protocols. Moreover, the parliamentary petitions (Motion 19.4069 1 ; Postulat 21.3220 2 ) call for a Children Cohort as another crucial step in the promotion of more Swiss research for the health of the youngest.

Opinion: how are advances in aerosol science informing our understanding of the health impacts of outdoor particulate pollution?

“…Therefore, we must focus on developing tools to investigate which of the eight hallmarks are involved in disease development and detect early changes at low PM doses. In this regards, epidemiology may greatly benefit from advancements in environmental characterization, molecular phenotyping, multiomics, epigenetics, imaging, as well as the implementation of personalized and digital medicine (Probst-Hensch et al, 2022). The integration of these tools have the potential to transform modern population-based environmental epidemiology, advancing our understanding of disease etiology and enabling the connection of exposure to the development of specific disease hallmarks.…”

“…The establishment of national biobanks and citizen cohorts is key for investigating the causal links between exposure to PM components and diseases. These cohorts are the gold standard for understanding long-term health effects of environmental factors (Probst-Hensch et al, 2022). They provide evidence where randomized trials are unethical or unfeasible (Peters et al, 2022).…”

Willingness to participate in a personalized health cohort – Insights from the Swiss Health Study pilot phase

“…There have been extensive discussions about the strategic importance of setting up a large-scale nationwide population-based cohort and biobank in Switzerland (7). Yet, participation rates in population-based cohorts or surveys in Switzerland have substantially dropped in the past 30 years.…”

“…Ideally, such an infrastructure would facilitate the e cient and safe use of data providing information on health, lifestyle, and exposure trajectories, the development of disease and risk factors over time, if conducted in parallel to a large-scale population-based cohort and biobank. It would also allow identifying determinants of healthy aging, causes of disease or contributing factors, health services access, use and costs, which are crucial to developing public health strategies and policies for the improvement of population health (7).…”

Swiss Cohort & Biobank—An Ambitious and Timely Large-Scale Cohort Study

“…Recently, Fagherazzi called for a "cohort moonshot" (10) that would allow sustained and long-term follow-ups within Europe (Figure 1). Indeed, challenges such as population growth and ageing societies, urbanization, globalization and supply chain dependencies, digital transformation, increasing social disparities, the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, as well as military conflicts will impact public health globally as well as locally (3,7). Large-scale cohorts are a necessary investment into understanding the challenges of tomorrow.…”