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The results of work carried out using Constances data made available as part of a project must be made public, in the form of scientific publications, presentations, reports, theses or dissertations, etc.
Before finalizing the manuscript, ensure compliance with the “Dissemination of research results” guidelines outlined in the Constances cohort access charter.
In particular, the signatures of at least two members of the Constances team must appear, the fact that the research was carried out as part of the Constances cohort must be mentioned in any publication or scientific communication, and the word “Constances” must appear in the title or at least in the abstract of any publication. Similarly, the DOI associated with the cohort must be explicitly included, both as a reference in the methodology section and in the acknowledgments of the publication (details below).
Whenever possible, Constances publications should be published in Open Access and archived on the HAL platform.
A STROBE Statement is available in the « Useful document » section.
The Constances cohort was designed as a random sample of French adults aged 18 to 69 years at the time of inclusion. Approximately 220,000 volunteers were enrolled between 2012 and 2019. At baseline, selected participants were invited to complete self-administered questionnaires and to attend a Health examination center for a comprehensive medical check-up. A biobank containing blood and urine samples was also created. Participants follow-up includes an annual self-administered questionnaire (paper or internet), a medical examination every four years, and yearly linkage with national medico-administrative databases. Virtually none of the participants are permanently lost to follow-up, as they are passively monitored in these national databases on an ongoing basis.
Data collected from participants include their demographic characteristics, socio-economic status, life events, behaviors, and occupational attributes. In addition to questionnaires and health examinations, medical and social data are obtained through linkage with French national medico-administrative databases, including the National health data system (Système national des données de santé, SNDS). Overall, available health data cover a wide range of topics, including self-reported health scales, clinical and paraclinical examinations, occupational and residential environments, prevalent and incident diseases, chronic conditions, hospitalizations, work absences, disabilities, healthcare use, and mortality (including causes of death).
For descriptive studies presenting population prevalence or incidence estimates, and to address non-participation at inclusion and attrition during longitudinal follow-up, a representative random cohort of 440,000 non-participants was created. This cohort is linked to the same national administrative databases as the participants, allowing for follow-up of similar same socio-economic and health data. It enables the analysis of personal, socioeconomic, and health factors associated with participation, and supports the development of statistical weighting techniques to estimate population-weighted prevalence or incidence of various health indicators in the general French population.
The authors certify that all procedures performed in the study complied with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the 1975 Declaration of Helsinki, as revised in 2008. All procedures were approved by the Institutional review board (IRB) of the National institute of health and medical research (Inserm) (Opinions No. 01-011 and No. 21-842), and authorized by the French data protection authority (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés, CNIL) (Authorization No. 910486). The biobank received a favorable opinion from the Research ethics committee (Comité de protection des personnes) (CPP Sud Est I, Opinions No. 2018-32) and was authorized by the CNIL (Authorization No. DR-2-2018-137). All volunteers signed written informed consent for their participation in the Constances cohort, and when applicable, for inclusion in the biobank (ethical approvals, authorizations, and consent procedures are available under the “Rights and data protection” section of the Constances website).
The Constances cohort is supported and funded by the French national health insurance fund (Caisse nationale d’assurance maladie, CNAM). Constances is recognized as a “National infrastructure in biology and health” and receives funding from the French national research agency (ANR-11-INBS-0002 and ANR-23-INBS-0001). The cohort is also marginally funded by private sector companies, notably from the healthcare industry, within the framework of public-private partnerships. None of these funding sources played any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, or the decision to publish the findings.
The authors thank the team of the Epidemiological Population Cohorts Unit in France (UMS 011 – Inserm, Universités Paris Cité, Paris Saclay, Versailles Saint-Quentin), which designed and manages the Constances French national cohort ; doi.org/10.13143/inserm_constances. They also acknowledge the French national health insurance fund (Caisse nationale d’assurance maladie, CNAM) and its Health examination centers for collecting a large part of the data, as well as the French national old-age insurance fund (Caisse nationale d’assurance vieillesse, CNAV) for their contribution to the establishment of the cohort, and ClinSearch for performing data quality control. Access to confidential data, on which is based this work, has been made possible within a secure environment offered by CASD – Centre d’accès sécurisé aux données (Ref. 10.34724/CASD).
The data used in this study are not publicly available. Access can be granted upon approval of a research proposal by the Constances cohort international scientific committee and provided the project meets the legal requirements set by the French data protection authority (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés, CNIL) under the General data protection regulation (GDPR). The use of cohort data is governed by the Constances cohort access charter. The data access procedure is available on the Constances cohort website (https://www.constances.fr : Home 〉 Scientific area 〉 Access to Constances)