A. Heather Eliassen
Harvard University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
How do diet, body weight, medications, environment and other experiences across a woman's life, starting even before birth, shape her risk of cancer and her chances of surviving it? Answering this requires following very large numbers of people for decades and storing their biological samples before any cancer appears.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Nurses' Health Study II
cancer epidemiology
prospective cohort
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Continue long-term follow-up of the Nurses' Health Study II, a cohort of 116,430 women, updating diet, lifestyle, medication and medical data and tracking cancer diagnoses and deaths.
- Keep collecting blood and urine from women with breast cancer who gave samples before diagnosis, along with tumor tissue for new cancers and pre-diagnostic mammograms from before and after menopause.
- Test the long-term (2–3 year) reproducibility of gut microbiome sequencing from repeated stool samples collected from cohort participants.
- Improve data management and analysis tools to make it easier to share cohort data with cancer consortia and outside researchers.
More about the research
This grant continues the Nurses' Health Study II (NHSII), which has followed 116,430 women who enrolled in 1989 at ages 25 to 42. It is the only large cohort to enroll women before menopause. Questionnaires every two to four years have updated smoking, weight, medication use, diet, physical activity, environmental exposures based on geographic information systems (GIS) and diagnoses for more than 30 years, and follow-up remains at 88%. The study also holds information on exposures in the womb and in infancy, reported by participants' mothers, and on diet during high school. Its biorepository includes blood and urine from 29,611 women, many sampled at defined points in the menstrual cycle, second samples from 16,510 women, cheek-cell DNA from about 30,000 more, stool and oral samples from nearly 20,000 for microbiome studies, tumor tissue, and mammograms taken before diagnosis. Genome-wide association (GWAS) and metabolomic data exist for large subsets. The project will continue follow-up, keep collecting blood, urine, tumor tissue and mammograms, run a 2–3 year reproducibility study of gut microbiome sequencing, and improve data management for sharing with consortia and outside investigators.
Why it matters
The cohort supports studies of how diet, lifestyle, biomarkers and genetics relate to cancer risk and survival in women, including breast, ovarian, colorectal and endometrial cancers. It is a major source of data on premenopausal breast cancer for international consortia. Findings could inform cancer prevention advice for women across their lives.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Francine Laden
Harvard University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine how air pollution, ultraviolet radiation, radon, demographic factors and social determinants of health relate to mammographic density, texture and deep-learning risk scores in Nurses' Health Study 3 participants.
Richard MacLehose
Tulane University of Louisiana, LA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure brain structure, brain function, cognition and blood-based markers related to Alzheimer's disease in adults aged 40–55 from the Bogalusa, NGHS and Princeton lipid cohorts.
Tongzhang Zheng
Brown University, RI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether pre-diagnosis blood levels of PFAS, especially PFOA, PFOS and PFHxS, predict later renal cell carcinoma, comparing about 650 cases with 1,300 matched controls from five US cohorts.
The school
Harvard University: 42 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 712 research doctorates a year.
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