During the COVID-19 pandemic it was widely observed that people with obesity had a higher chance of SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, detailed information on the degree and duration of overweight and obesity in relation to infection risk was still lacking. Therefore, NCC decided to conduct a meta-analysis using data from 99,570 participants of nine population-based cohorts, including three cohorts from Amsterdam Cohort Hub: HELIUS, the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) and the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR). The study, which was co-authored by various Amsterdam Public Health researchers, confirmed that overweight and obesity increased the risk of infection. The study also gave important information on potential preventive strategies: people with previous obesity who lost weight prior to the pandemic did not have a higher infection risk.
NCC was established a few years ago to create collaborations between all population-based and population-representative Dutch cohort studies that provide longitudinal clinical phenotyping and biomedical data for research into determinants of multimorbidity. Currently, NCC consists of 11 cohort studies, with a total of more than 450,000 participants.
The publication was published in Open Access and can be found here.