Outline of WP2: prevalence of risk factors and relative risks

Work Package Leader: Philippe Autier

This work package is essential for all the projections to function. The Prevent programme needs information on the prevalence of the selected risk factors (smoking, alcohol consumption, overweight, fruit & vegetable consumption and physical activity) and the accompanying relative risks. In order to combine countries into regions and compare countries and regions with each other, it is important that the data are collected in a similar fashion and in the same categories.

This work package will collect information on:

1. (trends in) prevalence of lifestyle risk factors for cancer in different European countries
2. relative risks associated with each level of exposure of the risk factors under study in order to be able to calculate the proportion of cancer incidence in European countries that is attributable to these risk factors

An overview with data on prevalence of tobacco smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, insufficient vegetable and fruit consumption, lack of physical exercise and overweight for the different parts of Europe around the year 2004 will be made. In this work package a definite proposal will be made on which tumours to include.

A similar project, calculating population-attributable risks for France in the year 2000, has already been published, click here for the on-line version. 

Click here for an overview of the results so far of this work package.

The categorisation will be as follows:

Smoking: data source: Eurostat, click here for the link

• Never smokers
• Ex-smokers
• Current smokers, < 20 cigarettes per day
• Current smokers, >= 20 cigarettes per day

Data available for the following countries: AT, B, BG, CH, CY, CZ, D, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GR, HU, IE, IS, IT, LT, LV, MT, NL, NO, PL, PT, RO, SE, SL, SK, UK

Overweight as a continuous variable (various data-sources)