European Prospective Investigation of Cancer – Cardiovascular Disease

EPIC-CVD is an EU funded large, pan-European initiative with the overarching goal of providing clinicians and policy-makers with a menu of evidence-based options for cost-effective individualised cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk assessment that enables more personalised predictive medicine. Encompassing InterAct and EPIC-Heart (existing projects based on diabetes and coronary heart disease respectively) and expanding to include stroke cases, the EPIC-CVD project includes more than 500,000 individuals from 10 diverse countries from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC). Over 39,000 of these people have now developed heart disease, stroke or type 2 diabetes since they joined the study in the 1990's, providing the basis for the most powerful population-based prospective study of CVD risk prediction and screening ever conducted. EPIC-CVD incorporates information on genetics, biomarkers and lifestyle to be the first study capable of creating a risk score that captures the interplay of nature and nurture for CVD risk prediction across Europe.

EPIC-CVD is co-ordinated by Professor John Danesh and Dr Adam Butterworth at the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. Dr Laura Johnson leads the working groups on sugar-sweetened drinks, breakfast and mechanistic dietary patterns.