Building the world's largest health study on heart-, vascular- and lung diseases

SCAPIS, a population-based health research project on heart-, vascular- and lung diseases, is launched today in Umeå, Sweden. The project's aim is to build the world's largest collection of health data in order to identify individual factors for disease. SCAPIS, which is principally funded by the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation, is a collaboration between Umeå University and University Hospital of Umeå and five other national universities.

A total of 30,000 randomly selected individuals, aged 50-64, will be invited to participate in the study. The ultimate goal of SCAPIS (Swedish CArdioPulmonary bioImage Study) is that a blood sample will be sufficient to identify patients who are at risk for example stroke, COPD, sudden cardiac arrest and heart attack.

"SCAPIS will be an internationally unique health data depository with the long-term potential to yield important research discoveries. The endgame goal is for healthcare providers to administer individually tailored treatment before the onset of lung or heart disease, enabling at-risk patients to live healthier and longer lives," says Kristina Sparreljung, Secretary General of the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation.

Subjects invited to participate in the study will receive thorough heart-, vascular- and lungs examinations with the latest technology, such as computed tomography. Participants will receive their test results showing, for example, blood glucose and lipid levels, blood pressure and heart activity. Subjects who in the process are diagnosed with a disease with need for treatment will be directed to the appropriate care.

In Umeå, the SCAPIS study includes 2,500 subjects from the region. The study is conducted at the University Hospital of Umeå (NUS). Umeå University and NUS are unique within the SCAPIS project because of the extensive amounts of preexisting population health data, collected in the Väster- and Norrbotten regions for 30 years, as part of its ongoing Västerbotten and MONICA population studies.

"The SCAPIS study will provide excellent opportunities to identify new associations between biomarkers for disease in blood samples collected here in the last 30 years with the subsequent findings on lung and heart disease," says Anders Blomberg, principal researcher at SCAPIS and professor at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine at Umeå University.