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October 28th, 2022 - Press release

The Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute participates in the Carlos III Health Institute's IMPaCT Cohort project

This is a study cohort comprising 200,000 people, which will be used to study and improve the health of the Spanish population. Dr. Jordi Alonso, head of the Health Services Research Group at the IMIM-Hospital del Mar, is a member of the project's executive committee, which has just completed its first year of work.

The Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute is one of the 21 Spanish institutions that, together with the National Statistics Institute (INE), form part of the IMPaCT Cohort project. This initiative is aimed at creating a cohort of 200,000 people over the age of fifteen and using them to study and improve the health of the population. The project has been running for a year, and a meeting was held at the end of September, in Alcalá de Henares, to analyse its progress.

Jordi Alonso

Dr Jordi Alonso, head of the Health Services Research Group at IMIM-Hospital del Mar, is a member of the executive committee of the IMPaCT Cohort, one of the three Infrastructure for Precision Medicine associated with Science and Technology (IMPaCT) programmes, coordinated and funded by the Carlos III Health Institute through the CIBER on Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP). Information will be collected from participants through questionnaires, physical examinations, physiological tests and by analysing biomarkers in biological samples.

This will provide valuable information for the prevention of major diseases as well as age-related deterioration, injury and disability. The cohort will be monitored indefinitely, thus increasing the value of the information collected. Cohort studies provide very robust evidence for assessing causal associations of all kinds of factors, such as environmental or personal ones, with pathologies.

Few countries in the world have such a large population-based cohort study. IMPaCT Cohort studies should make it possible to build predictive models of disease, identify health inequalities, monitor key indicators and evaluate the impact of health policies.