FOREVER objectives, cohorts and database structure.
- To identify risk factors and predictors of visual disability
- To identify risk factors and predictors of systemic conditions
- To validate the current eye health check in Synoptik A/S
The two FOREVER cohorts. A selected cohort of 30,000 individuals will be invited by email. All participants in the selected cohort will be +50 and are eligible for inclusion if they have had a fundus photograph taken 3 years prior to the invitation. The extended cohort will consist of a minimum of 250,000 participants that will be invited after their advanced eye exam in any Synoptik store across Denmark. The extended population will enroll participants from the age of +18.
Together with Synoptik A/S we do our best to engage the population to participate with the overall goal to improve eye health.
This Figure shows the flow of data collection in the selected and extended cohorts for the FOREVER project. Participants in the selected cohort will be invited to participate via email, which will include a consent form, project information and the FOREVER questionnaire. These participants will have previously had a fundus photograph taken three years prior to enrollment. If they agree to participate, they will sign a written consent form at a Synoptik store and have a saliva sample and written consent will then be sent to the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) and securely stored. The questionnaire will be completed and stored online in the secure database REDCap. All other data will also be transferred to UPCH's cloud storage.
In the extended population, participants will be recruited at Synoptik stores. After customers have had the advanced eye exam, they will be asked if they would like to participate in the Project FOREVER. If they verbally consent, their social security number and full name will be sent securely and encrypted to UPCH and stored in REDCap. UCPH will the automatically send an invitation, a video explaining the project, a consent form and the FORVER questionnaire to the potential participant. If they sign the consent form, it will be stores in REDCap at UCPH. A list of participants who have consented will automatically be forwarded to Synoptik, and data will be transferred to to UCPH's cloud storage.
The figure illustrates the FOREVER database (FOREVERdb). Data will be stored securely and no data will leave the FOREVERdb except for exchange with Statistic Denmark (Danmarks Statistik). Within the FOREVERdb, an Evaluation Interface (EI) has been developed for the assessment and validation of all participants in the selected population. When the evaluation has been performed, the data are locked and become immutable. All image will be stores in a remote cloud and only made available upon request to minimize the cost of data storage. When a new project has been submitted to and approved by the FOREVER steering group, the researcher will be granted acces to relevant data in a separate cloud as depicted as "project A" and "project B". We intend that as many researchers with societally relevant research questions as possible should be able to acces FOREVERdb.