As the largest health research cohort study in western Canada, Alberta’s Tomorrow Project (ATP) has created a vast data repository from its 55,000 participants.
Billions of points of data have been gathered, on health history, lifestyle, genetics, and environment, allowing researchers to examine what causes and what might help prevent cancer and chronic diseases.
Further, more than 99% of ATP participants have consented to linkage of their personal health care information with administrative databases, enabling deep exploration into environmental exposures, primary care and hospital usage, treatment, prescriptions and resulting health outcomes.
Major projects include:
Alberta’s Tomorrow Project (ATP) was established in 2000 to support research into what causes and what may prevent cancer and chronic disease. ATP recruited 55,000 men and women between the ages of 35 and 69 years, from towns and cities across the province, to be followed for the next 50 years. Qualifying participants had no prior malignant cancers at enrollment.
Regular behaviours are tracked in repeat questionnaires, offering insight into long-term and evolving health-related habits and activities.
Blood and urine were donated by a majority of participants. Over time, repeat collections will offer a resource of pre- and post-diagnosis biosamples for study.
ATP’s lifestyle data can be linked with other databases to create a more accurate picture of disease prevention or progression
Researchers studying risk factors for cancer and chronic disease can apply for access to ATP’s rich resource of data and biological samples.
Contact ATP’s Access team at atp.research@ahs.ca.
For more information about the platform and ongoing research, please visit myatp.ca.
