The Shanghai Women's Health Study: Rationale, Study Design, and Baseline Characteristics

Abstract

Although cancer is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in most nations, the spectrum of cancer occurrence varies substantially worldwide. Most previous epidemiologic studies investigating cancer etiology were conducted in North American and western European countries that are relatively homogenous in terms of cancer spectrums and many lifestyle exposures. These limitations may have hindered these studies from evaluating some important etiologic hypotheses. From 1996 to 2000, the Shanghai Women's Health Study recruited 74,942 adult Chinese women from selected urban communities, with a 92% response rate. All participants completed a detailed baseline survey and anthropometrics. Approximately 88% of cohort members donated a urine sample (n = 65,755) and a blood (n = 56,832) or exfoliated buccal cell (n = 8,934) sample. Noteworthy characteristics of this cohort include low consumption of alcohol (1.9%) and use of tobacco (2.4%); high intake of fish (mean, 50.8 g/day), soy foods (mean, 142.3 g/day), and certain vegetables; low prevalence of obesity (5.1%); and nearly 100% employment outside the home. Currently, this cohort of women is being followed via biennial in-person recontact and periodic linkage to cancer and vital statistics registries. The resources from the cohort will be valuable in future studies of environmental exposures and biomarkers for the risk of cancer and other chronic diseases.

Age at menarche and age at natural menopause in East Asian women: a genome-wide association study

“…The Stage I study was a meta-analysis of results of AM and ANM association using data generated from the Shanghai Genome-Wide Association Studies (SGWAS), which included female participants of the Shanghai Breast Cancer Genetics Study (SBCS) (Zheng et al 2009), the Shanghai Endometrial Cancer Study (SECS) (Long et al 2012), the Shanghai Type II Diabetes Studies (ST2DS) , the Shanghai Colorectal Cancer Study (SCRCS) (Jia et al 2013;Zhang et al 2014), and other ancillary studies using the Shanghai Women's Health Study (SWHS) samples (Petersen et al 2010;Abnet et al 2010). All these studies, except for the SBCS and SECS, drew women from the SWHS, a population-based cohort study (Zheng et al 2005). We defined a suggestive locus as a genomic region wherein one or more singlenucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) showed P < 1 × 10…”

“…Women with a non-natural cause of menopause (i.e., menopause brought on by surgery, radiation treatment, or chemotherapy) were excluded. The details on study design and participant characteristics for the SGWAS and the SWHS have been described elsewhere (Zheng et al 2005;Wen et al 2014). Written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to interview, and the study protocols were approved by the institutional review boards of all institutions involved in the study.…”

Body mass index at various ages and mortality in Chinese women: impact of potential methodological biases

“…Details of the study methods have been described elsewhere. 7 Briefly, all women 40-70 years of age living in seven typical urban communities of Shanghai were invited to participate in the study. Between December 1996 and May 2000, a total of 74 942 women were recruited, with a participation rate of 92.7%.…”

Family history of malignancies and risk of breast cancer: prospective data from the Shanghai women’s health study

“…A detailed description of SWHS population has been published elsewhere [41]. Briefly, a roster of 81,170 women aged 40-70 years was obtained from the resident offices in seven communities located in urban Shanghai, China.…”