Determining the relative burden of women’s health conditions and related co-morbidities in an Eastern Mediterranean population.
How can we understand the burden of disease and plan for its prevention if we don’t know who is affected or why they are affected? This is exactly what the Cyprus Women’s Health Research Initiative (COHERE) aims to address with the first population-based cross-sectional women’s health study, based in Northern Cyprus.
Cyprus is the third largest Mediterranean island with around 300,000 Turkish Cypriot and 700,000 Greek Cypriot residents. There is lack of reliable population-level health data from Northern Cyprus and as a result, this region is absent from any health statistics published by the Republic of Cyprus. Secondly, there is lack of benign women’s health related data from the Eastern Mediterranean region as a whole where genetically diverse populations live and various environmental factors that could affect disease susceptibilities exist. The Cyprus Women’s Health Research (COHERE) initiative aims to establish a women’s health cohort in Northern Cyprus to collect information on health, morbidity and resource-use data and to enable investigation of factors that affect women’s health. It is a population-based, cross-sectional study which has recruited 10% of women living in Northern Cyprus between the ages of 18-55 (n=8,000).
The COHERE Initiative will provide the first systematically collected population health data for Northern Cyprus – an emerging EU region for which public health issues have been unexplored to date. It will aid the understanding of regional women’s health and illness patterns as well as the personal, social/economic burden of symptomatology and disease. Disease rates, clinical profiles and healthcare statistics of women in this population will be used to assess the relative burden of disease with these results forming the basis for targeted hypothesis-driven local follow-up studies. In addition to this, the Cypriot adaptation of the ‘Mediterranean lifestyle’ allows for investigation of the influence of both environmental as well as genetic factors specific to Eastern Mediterranean populations.
The aims of the COHERE Initiative are:
- Understand the distribution and prevalence rates of gynaecological conditions (including endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome and uterine fibroids) and associated symptomatology and autoimmune, inflammatory, metabolic and pain comorbidity profiles;
- Investigate the effect of reproductive and lifestyle factors on women’s health;
- Map the geospatial distribution of identified conditions and investigate correlations with demographic and life-style factors;
- Investigate the genetic architecture of the population in order to understand the disease-causing genetic risk factors in the region.
Contact: Nilufer Rahmioglu (nilufer@well.ox.ac.uk) Instagram (@cohere_kisaa) Facebook (@KISAAInisiyatifi)