In thousands of published papers, the five CHARGE cohort studies and many of the collaborating studies have already characterized the risk factors for and the incidence and prognosis of a variety of aging-related and cardiovascular conditions. The analysis of the incident myocardial infarction, for instance, is free from the survival bias typically associated with cross-sectional or case-control studies. The methodologic advantages of the prospective population-based cohort design, the similarity of phenotypes across five studies, the availability of genome-wide genotyping data in each cohort, and the need for large sample sizes to provide reliable estimates of genotype-phenotype associations have served as the primary incentives for the formation of the CHARGE consoritum, which includes GWAS data on about 38,000 individuals. The consortium effort relies on collaborative methods that are similar to those used by the individual contributing cohorts.
