The study was conducted in the Lombardy region of Italy, which includes approximately 9,600,000 people and is served by a network of modern hospitals, medical schools, and a regional health service. The catchment area includes 5 cities (Milan, Monza, Brescia, Pavia, and Varese) and surrounding towns and villages, for a total of 216 municipalities, encompassing over 3,000,000 people. The theoretical ideal is random collection of cases from the population, e.g., through a cancer registry. However, random selection from hundreds of large and small hospitals would have made collection of biospecimens (particularly fresh frozen tissue samples) and detailed epidemiological and clinical data unfeasible. Thus, we designed EAGLE to be as close as possible to a really comprehensive population-based study through enrollment of cases in a defined set of hospitals, which examine approximately 80% of all lung cancer cases from the catchment area. These hospitals were selected based on a review of the hospital admission/discharge records from the years 1997–2000.
