NCC

Netherlands Cohorts Consortium

The Netherlands Cohorts Consortium (NCC) brings together health data from almost half a million Dutch people. These data will be used to conduct ground-breaking research to better understand the causes of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia and depression, and reasons why these are occurring at increasingly younger ages. NCC will build a state-of-the-art infrastructure, also for future data collection, with excellent IT facilities for joint data analysis, while guaranteeing the privacy and safety of the data. By combining the data, we will gain valuable insights into how to prevent these diseases.

Website NCC

Infrastructure and User Services

The Netherlands Cohort Consortium (NCC) is a nationwide large scale research infrastructure for population health science. NCC will merge existing longitudinal health and facilitate the alignment of future data collections across the Netherlands. To that purpose it establishes a technical infrastructure to enable advanced data-analysis open to the (inter)national health science community.

The consortium involves world prominent Dutch scientists, who currently lead 11 population-based cohort studies. These cohort studies jointly comprise longitudinal health data from ~400.000 adults, which will be harmonised to facilitate joint analysis. The cohorts also operate high-throughput ethically and privacy secured research facilities, that allow new large-scale data collection. The technical infrastructure will include a distributed FAIR data platform and allow merging of data for meta-analysis, federated learning, and/or centralised high-performance computing at the ODISSEI Secure Supercomputer (OSSC).

Examples/description of the type of research

The uniqueness of the NCC data lies in the longitudinal design, the large-scale availability of biomaterials, and deep phenotyping of participants, including measurements pertaining to the basic (bio)medical sciences, and clinical data on (early) development and progression of disease. Also data on health economics and health care use are available, as well as environmental risks and socio-economics. NCC will also enable faster replication of findings and implementation of technical innovations and/or new (biological) measures at large scale. Furthermore, linkage methodology to external (medical) data sources will be implemented, along with innovations in statistical methodology, AI and machine learning. The cohorts are embedded at 7 out of 8 Dutch Medical Faculties, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment and VU University.

How to access the infrastructure?

The data at each cohort can be used for data analysis under the restriction of the informed consent via meta-analysis and data visiting by humans or algorithms or central data uploads, and the resources are present and accessible at each cohort to perform computations (federated and centralised data analysis).