Shanghai Women's Health Study

The Shanghai Women's Health Study (SWHS), a collaborative study by NCI, Vanderbilt University, and the Shanghai Cancer Institute, is a prospective cohort study of approximately 75,000 Chinese women who were recruited between 1997 and 2000. Members of the cohort have been followed through multiple in-person interviews to obtain information on diet, occupational and environmental exposures, and various lifestyle factors. Information from the follow-ups is linked to vital records and the tumor registry to obtain information on disease.

Special characteristics of the cohort include the following: It is a population-based sample with very high response rates; it is composed of almost entirely never-smokers; and it uses a detailed exposure database that includes tens of thousands of workplace measurements collected over many decades in Shanghai.

Over the years, data and biological samples (blood/buccal cell and urine) collected in the SWHS have been used to evaluate many important etiologic hypotheses and support multiple studies. Most recently, nested case-control molecular epidemiology studies and occupational exposure analyses of lung cancer, brain cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma have been conducted.

References

Hosgood HD, Cai Q, Hua X...Lan Q. Variation in oral microbiome is associated with future risk of lung cancer among never-smokers. Thorax 2021.

Seow WJ, Shu XO, Nicholson JK...Lan Q. Association of untargeted urinary metabolomics and lung cancer risk among never-smoking women in China. JAMA Netw Open 2019.

For more information, contact Dr. Qing Lan. 

Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch - Research Areas