Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
As the study of the aetiological architecture of chronic diseases advances to encompass more complex causal pathways-e.g. to include the joint effects of genes, lifestyle and environment-sample size requirements will increase further and the analysis of pooled individual-level data will become ever more important. An aim of this conceptual article is to encourage others to address the challenges and opportunities that DataSHIELD presents, and to explore potential extensions, for example to its use when different data sources hold different data on the same individuals.
Wolfson et al. (Wed,) studied this question.