Research Underway Using OHS Data

Diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes are the primary causes of death in Canadian adults and treating these and other illnesses costs the Canadian health care system billions of dollars annually. The researchers using Ontario Health Study data are investigating factors that increase the risk of developing various diseases, as well as what can be done to reduce the chance of developing them. These risk factors may include where people live and work, what they eat, how much they exercise, whether they smoke and other factors that have not yet been identified.

Operating grants available to use existing data sets

Sep 3, 2019

A new funding opportunity from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is available to support research that uses existing cohort data, administrative datasets and data platforms that link to or allow access to datasets from multiple sources.

Among the data sets that the CHIR wants to see used are those of the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project (CPTP), which includes large harmonized data sets from the Ontario Health Study. Another data set is the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE) which has previously accessed OHS and CPTP data.

The intent of the funding is to encourage use of existing cohorts, administrative and survey data to inform improved patient, population and system outcomes.

The CIHR Data Analysis Using Existing Databases and Cohorts funding opportunity provides a one-year operating grant within three streams of research:

Cancer prevention and control (10 grants up to $100,000 each)
Healthy cities intervention research (7 grants up to $75,000 each)
Reproductive, maternal, child and youth health (6 grants up to $75,000)

New funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research will help Ontario team study metabolic syndromes

Jul 18, 2018

Data and samples from the Ontario Health Study will be used to research a range of health conditions that increase the risk of serious disease.

Read the media release to find out more.

OHS Principal Investigator part of team awarded two grants from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) to study the impact of environmental exposures and genetics

Jul 1, 2018

Dr. Philip Awadalla, the Ontario Health Study’s Principal Investigator, is part of a University of Toronto team that was awarded a $4 million grant in 2016 from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) for the Canadian Environmental Urban Health Research Consortium project.

The consortium will play a key role in supporting the research needed to address challenges such as urban sprawl, traffic congestion, car-dependency, social equity and sustainability. More than 80% of Canadians live in cities so it’s important that cities are designed in a way that support the health of those who live there.

The group is tasked with pulling together existing data and information from a wide variety of sources related to urban issues to create one resource. The data relates to aspects of urban living such air quality, green space, and noise and will then be linked to health data platforms such as the Ontario Health Study.

As well, Dr. Awadalla is the team leader for a Pan-Canadian initiative to understand how these environmental exposures interact with an individual’s genome to impact the development of chronic diseases and cancer. This study is supported by the CIHR programmatic initiative in Environments, Genes and Chronic disease.

Click here to learn more.

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