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Nutritional epidemiology

Nutrition is a significant factor in cancer. Diet is considered especially important for cancers of the gastrointestinal tract and for breast cancer and prostate cancer.

Our Nutritional Epidemiology program maintains a strong focus on dietary assessment and on prospective studies. The dietary questionnaires developed for this purpose have gained wide acceptance by the public health community in Australia. We continue working to maintain our leading edge in this technology.

Selected Current projects

The Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study (Health 2020)

Diet and Cancer Pooling Project

Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer

The Pooling Project is an international consortium of at least 28 cohort studies with the goal of analysing diet and cancer associations using standardised criteria across studies.

The Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study is involved because it has used a comprehensive dietary assessment method to measure usual diet.

CED Investigators: Graham Giles, Roger Milne,

Objectives:

To evaluate whether diet and cancer associations are consistent across cohort studies comprised of different populations with different dietary habits.

For each association, we generate summary estimates, which have greater precision than any of the individual studies due to the larger sample sizes.

To examine whether associations differ for specific population subgroups (ex: between men and women; among never, past and current smokers; between lean and overweight individuals) or for different histologic types or subsites of specific cancers.