Today, the HUNT 1-4 Study is a database with information on approximately 140,000 people that integrates family data and individual data that can be linked to regional EMRs and national health registries.
The HUNT4 study (completed in February 2019) was run in a similar way as HUNT3 and comprises questionnaires, interview and clinical exams. New features in HUNT4 include activity sensors and body composition (impedance) as well as a special focus on the elderly above 70 years of age with cognitive and memory testing, gait test and functional MRI on subsets.
Repeated examinations and follow-up of the same population make it possible to ascertain changes in health and vital status at individual and family levels. The HUNT Study is reinforced and supplemented by cross-referencing with structured EMRs data (ICD10 and procedures done at regional hospitals) and separate endpoint registries in diseases such as radial and hip fractures, ischemic heart disease and stroke. The HUNT consent allow cross-linking with registries at the national level (The Cancer Register, The Medical Birth Register). Additionally, Statistics Norway provides necessary information from The Population Census Register and The Family Register to create a genealogical database ("family trees").
A detailed overview and a searchable database of all available variables, with metadata, are available directly from the HUNT databank https://hunt-db.medisin.ntnu.no/hunt-db/#/.
HUNT genetic data
As a result of an ongoing collaboration between the HUNT Research Centre/NTNU and the University of Michigan, approximately 70,000 individuals from the HUNT2 and HUNT3 cohorts have been genotyped (completed 2015).
Genotyping of the HUNT2/3 participants have been conducted using the HumanCoreExome-24+ BeadChip provided by Illumina. The chip contains all tag SNPs found on the Illumina HumanCore BeadChip as well as 240,000 markers from the HumanExome BeadChip. The BeadChip can provide valuable data for downstream applications such as common variant, loss-of-function variant, indels, and copy number variation studies.
In addition to the standard 547,644 markers found on the HumanCoreExome-24 BeadChip, an additional 70,000 HUNT-specific variants were added. One of the sources for the custom content has been variants originally identified from a whole genome genetic sequencing of a 2000 HUNT participants. The imputed dataset now cover around 30 million markers.