Maastricht UMC+ is the main applicant for the Dutch Cohort Consortium (NCC), which has secured over €17 million from NWO (Dutch Research Council). This investment unites virtually all university medical centres and key institutes in the Netherlands, creating a unique national mega cohort with data from almost half a million Dutch citizens.

The NCC combines the strengths of the eleven largest and most comprehensive cohorts in the Netherlands, including The Maastricht Study. This connection creates a coherent source of knowledge about health, lifestyle, environment and ageing. Thanks to the subsidy, the consortium will be able to conduct large-scale research into how and why people age healthily and what we can do to prevent diseases. The emphasis will be on multimorbidity (the co-occurrence of multiple chronic conditions) and new health risks, such as emerging infectious diseases. 

“The NCC brings together health data from almost half a million Dutch people,” says Miranda Schram (Cardiovascular Research Institute Maastricht (CARIM), MHeNs - Mental Health and Neuroscience Research Institute), professor of diabetes epidemiology and lead applicant for the subsidy. “With this data, we are conducting groundbreaking research into the causes of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia and depression, and the reasons why these are occurring at an increasingly younger age.”

Learn more about this national partnership to ensure healthier ageing for all: https://lnkd.in/ebCDM86Z