Towards a Swiss health study with human biomonitoring: Learnings from the pilot phase about participation and design

Réjane Morand Bourqui; Semira Gonseth Nusslé; Natalie von Goetz; Caroline Veys-Takeuchi; Claire Zuppinger; Yoanne Boulez; Nolwenn Bühler; Laurence Chapatte; Christine Currat; Aline Dousse; Vincent Faivre; Oscar H Franco; Julien Virzi; Martine Bourqui-Pittet; Murielle Bochud

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0289181

Towards a Swiss health study with human biomonitoring: Learnings from the pilot phase about participation and design

PLoS One. 2023 Jul 31;18(7):e0289181. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289181. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Réjane Morand Bourqui¹, Semira Gonseth Nusslé², Natalie von Goetz^{1

3}, Caroline Veys-Takeuchi², Claire Zuppinger², Yoanne Boulez², Nolwenn Bühler⁴, Laurence Chapatte⁵, Christine Currat⁵, Aline Dousse⁵, Vincent Faivre², Oscar H Franco⁶, Julien Virzi⁵, Martine Bourqui-Pittet¹, Murielle Bochud²

Affiliations

¹ Health Protection Directorate, Federal Office of Public Health, Bern, Switzerland.
² General Direction, Center for Primary Care and Public Health, Unisanté, Lausanne, Switzerland.
³ Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Zurich, Switzerland.
⁴ Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
⁵ Swiss Biobanking Platform, Epalinges, Switzerland.
⁶ Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.

Abstract

Background: A large-scale national cohort aiming at investigating the health status and determinants in the general population is essential for high-quality public health research and regulatory decision-making. We present the protocol and first results of the pilot phase to a Swiss national cohort aiming at establishing the study procedures, evaluating feasibility, and assessing participation and willingness to participate.

Methods: The pilot phase 2020/21 included 3 components recruited via different channels: a population-based cross-sectional study targeting the adult population (20-69 years) of the Vaud and Bern cantons via personal invitation, a sub-study on selenium in a convenience sample of vegans and vegetarians via non-personal invitation in vegan/vegetarian networks, and a self-selected sample via news promotion (restricted protocol). Along with a participatory approach and participation, we tested the study procedures including online questionnaires, onsite health examination, food intake, physical activity assessments and biosample collection following high-quality standards.

Results: The population-based study and the selenium sub-study had 638 (participation rate: 14%) and 109 participants, respectively, both with an over-representation of women. Of altogether 1349 recruited participants over 90% expressed interest in participating to a national health study, over 75% to contribute to medicine progress and help improving others' health, whereas about one third expressed concerns over data protection and data misuse.

Conclusions: Publicly accessible high-quality public health data and human biomonitoring samples were collected. There is high interest of the general population in taking part in a national cohort on health. Challenges reside in achieving a higher participation rate and external validity. For project management clear governance is key.

Copyright: © 2023 Morand Bourqui et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adult
Biological Monitoring*
Cross-Sectional Studies
Female
Humans
Selenium*
Switzerland
Vegetarians

Substances

Selenium

Grants and funding

The study has been funded by the Swiss government through its agencies (FOPH, Federal Office of Food Security and Veterinary Affairs (FSVO) and Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN)), and from the involved institutions: the Center for Primary care and Public Health, Unisanté in Lausanne, the Swiss Trop-ical and Public Health Institute in Basel, and the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, ISPM, Bern. FSVO and FOEN had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or prepara-tion of the manuscript. FOPH and the involved institutions cited above were involved in developing the study design. Unisanté and ISPM were involved in data collection, Unisanté and FOPH in data analysis. FOPH, Unisanté and ISPM were involved in the decision to publish. FOPH and Unisanté were involved in the preparation of the manuscript.