Cohort Profile Update: The Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP)

... The Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP) comprises the two independent cohorts SHIP-START (recruited between 1997 and 2001) and SHIP-TREND (recruited between 2008 to 2012), which were established to examine the health and disease status of the general adult population in Northeast Germany given that this region had the lowest life expectancy in Germany in the 1990s.1 The initial cohort was renamed SHIP-START to avoid confusion with designation of SHIP, as the whole project comprises different cohorts. Both cohorts serve the purpose of understanding the concepts of health and disease in their greatest possible complexity, rather than focusing on specific disease areas. Consequently, the examination programmes are the most comprehensive that have ever been applied to a general population sample worldwide; the baseline examinations of SHIP-TREND took ≤25 h. The second follow-up of SHIP-START (SHIP-START-2) and baseline SHIP-TREND-0 were the first studies worldwide to utilize whole-body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in a general population setting.2