Family Heritability, Investigating Gene-gene and Gene-environment Interactions in the Field of Cardiovascular Diseases - 4th VISIT (at 17 Years) of the STANISLAS COHORT

The Stanislas Cohort is a monocentric familial longitudinal cohort comprised of 1006 families (4295 subjects) from the Nancy region recruited in 1993-1995 at the Centre for Preventive Medicine (Centre de Médecine Préventive, CMP), Vandoeuvre lès Nancy for a 5-year periodic health examination, under the auspices of the Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Maladie (CNAM).

This cohort was established with the primary objective of investigating gene-gene and gene-environment interactions in the field of cardiovascular diseases, based on the study of inter-individual variability and familial segregation analysis of biological and morphological intermediate phenotypes of cardiovascular risk. The longitudinal nature of this study should enable to take into account the evolution of intermediate phenotypes related to genetic factors throughout the follow-up period. The families, consisting of two parents and at least two biological children, were deemed healthy, free of declared acute and/or chronic illness, in order to assess the effect of genetics on the variability of intermediate phenotypes studied under physiological conditions (without the influence, in the absence) of pathology.

The Stanislas Cohort is, both nationally and internationally, the only longitudinal familial cohort of supposedly healthy subjects on such a large scale.

Brief summary of ancillary study "Cardiac Functional Indices Comparison Between MRI and Echocardiography" : the ESCIF study is an ancillary study of the Stanislas cohort aiming at comparing in a cohort of supposedly healthy subjects different cardiac functional indices between two different modalities : Echocardiography and MRI. Indeed, new cardiac functional indices have been recently developed in the scope of echocardiography and would be very useful in MRI. In echography they are computed either from tissue Doppler imaging or from a specific image analysis called speckle tracking. These two techniques are accessible in MRI with the Generalized Reconstruction by Inversion of Coupled Systems (GRICS) technology which provides a motion model from which strains and strain rates may be derived and which allow longer acquisition without the constraint of breath holding (mandatory to reach high temporal resolution).