2012 Publications
EPIC - the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition
EPIC – the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition is a prospective study designed to investigate the relationships between diet and other lifestyle factors and the incidence of different forms of cancer. The total cohort involves over half a million men and women from ten European countries. The EPIC-Oxford cohort consists of 65,000 men and women living throughout the United Kingdom.
EPIC-Oxford is a prospective study of about 65,000 men and women living throughout the United Kingdom, recruited between 1993 and 2000. Approximately half of the participants are non meat-eaters, making this study unique in being able to examine the effects of a vegetarian diet on long-term health. EPIC-Oxford is part of the European EPIC collaboration, which includes over 500,000 people recruited in ten European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. EPIC is co-ordinated by the World Health Organization’s IARC in Lyon, France.
To date, research in EPIC-Oxford has focused on the effects of diet on cancer risk and on blood levels of hormones and cholesterol, as these factors are associated with some common cancers and coronary heart disease. We are also looking at the effect of diet on obesity and how nutritional and lifestyle factors affect the risk of bone fractures. Some results have already been published in scientific journals; more details of these can be found at www.epic-oxford.org
Scientists involved in EPIC-Europe are conducting a large number of analyses on the associations of dietary intake with cancer risk, details of which can be found at www.epic-oxford.org and at http://epic.iarc.fr/. Current key projects are examining the associations between diet and cancers of the stomach, colorectum (large bowel), breast, prostate and lung.
EPIC is also contributing to the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3) and the Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility project (CGEMS), which have pooled data and biospecimens from nine large prospective cohorts to conduct research on gene variants and environmental factors in cancer aetiology.
