The ABACus Study

Study Title: Adulthood BMI trajectories And Cancer using Clusters (ABACus)

Principle Investigator: Professor Andrew Renehan

Sponsor:

Funders:

Summary

Elevated body mass index (BMI) and weight gain are risk factors for adult cancer but have limited utilisation as public health strategies for cancer prevention. Life-course epidemiology, through the global capture of adiposity exposure over time (for example, BMI trajectories) and subsequent occurrence of cancer, is potentially more relevant for cancer prevention as it offers a strategy to ‘target’ divergent early adverse trajectories.

The ABACus project focuses on deriving BMI trajectories using latent class models in a multi-cohort consortium and the subsequent association with cancer incidence. As this is a relatively novel methodology in cancer epidemiology, part of this work has been on standardising the development and selection of latent class models, in addition to the generalisability of these models between cohorts.