The Colorado Longitudinal Study: A Road to Better Health and Health Equity

One of society’s greatest challenges today is to improve health and achieve health equity for all at lower cost. I will speak about the plan of the Colorado Longitudinal Study (COLS) to create the largest, longitudinal repository of biological specimens and associated community and public health data in the world. I will discuss how we plan to recruit one million participants in Colorado to donate blood and urine annually for a 10-year period. COLS will also ask participants to provide comprehensive information about their health, behaviors, mood, and environment over time allowing researchers to study the interaction between biology and lifestyle in unprecedented ways. The impact of this will be more than additive, it will be multiplicative.

The COLS repository will be unlike any other in the world. It will revolutionize the way we approach health, health care, and health equity. It will allow researchers to ask questions that they have never been able to approach before. We hope you will become as passionate about our vision as we are.