The construction of a health check-up follow-up cohort holds significant importance for public health research. Since its establishment in 2022, the Health Check-up Cohort of Peking University Third Hospital (PUTH) has been operational for three years. The cohort features comprehensive health check-up indicators, including physical examination, biochemical tests, cancer screening, and 13 other major categories of indicators. It is equipped with a robust data management system and collaborates with the Clinical Epidemiology Research Center and the biobank. A multidimensional database has been established, covering health check-up information, health questionnaires, and biological samples of the study subjects. The cohort adopts a bidirectional study design, with the retrospective part covering individuals who underwent health check-ups since 2011 and the prospective part continuously enrolling subjects since 2022. As of 2023, the PUTH Health Check-up Cohort has collected health check-up data from over 80,000 study subjects, with the longest follow-up duration reaching 12 years, forming a longitudinal health database with continuous follow-up.
The cohort construction project has achieved favorable research outcomes, with a total of 14 academic papers published, including 8 SCI papers, and two invention patents granted. In addition, the cohort has collaborated with clinical departments within the hospital and has previously received funding from both internal and external horizontal and vertical projects. The primary focus has been on conducting research on medical reference value ranges and disease prevention and control among the health check-up cohort population. Building on the solid foundation of previous work, the cohort study will continue to optimize and expand, aiming to align with international large-scale cohorts by constructing a health check-up cohort with a large sample size, long follow-up duration, and high follow-up density.
The specific construction goals for this period include enrolling 100,000 individuals for dynamic follow-up, perfecting the biobank by collecting biological samples from 20,000 individuals, and gathering health questionnaire information from 30,000 people. The near-term goals emphasize the use of health check-up data combined with advanced artificial intelligence technologies to build disease prediction models and explore the association between retinal photographs and overall health status, which will assist in early screening and personalized interventions for high-risk populations. The medium- to long-term goals focus on biological age-related research, utilizing telomere length and multi-omics technologies to assess the differences between biological age and chronological age and analyze their key influencing factors. Data collection will be implemented through the health check-up centers of multiple campuses of PUTH.
The construction of this health check-up cohort provides a solid data foundation for the prevention of chronic diseases, individualized health management, and research on healthy aging. Through long-term follow-up and large-scale data collection, it can reveal disease risk factors, develop early prediction models, and in combination with biomarkers and multi-omics technologies, it helps explore the relationship between biological age and health status, promoting the development of precision medicine and the optimization of public health policies.