Adult education and the challenges of regional development: Policy and sustainability in North Denmark

Adult education is governed at many levels – internationally, nationally and locally. The authors of this paper look at the challenges, structures and practices of adult education policy at the local level, more specifically in North Denmark Northern Jutland), one of the five administrative regions of the Danish nation-state. In many ways, the current educational challenges in this remote region of Europe are similar to what can be observed worldwide and especially in countries which are generally considered welfare states. The authors see the growing social and educational divide between the region’s peripheral areas and its largest city centre as a major challenge – for society as a whole and for adult education in particular. It is from this perspective that the authors describe the present structures of adult education in the region and the strategies employed by local authorities and educational institutions. This is followed by an evaluation of both structures and efforts in terms of their ability to cope with the challenges

Cohort profile:Copenhagen Hospital Biobank - Cardiovascular Disease Cohort (CHB-CVDC): Construction of a large-scale genetic cohort to facilitate a better understanding of heart diseases

PURPOSE: The aim of Copenhagen Hospital Biobank-Cardiovascular Disease Cohort (CHB-CVDC) is to establish a cohort that can accelerate our understanding of CVD initiation and progression by jointly studying genetics, diagnoses, treatments and risk factors. PARTICIPANTS: The CHB-CVDC is a large genomic cohort of patients with CVD. CHB-CVDC currently includes 96 308 patients. The cohort is part of CHB initiated in 2009 in the Capital Region of Denmark. CHB is continuously growing with ~40 000 samples/year. Patients in CHB were included in CHB-CVDC if they were above 18 years of age and assigned at least one cardiovascular diagnosis. Additionally, up-to 110 000 blood donors can be analysed jointly with CHB-CVDC. Linkage with the Danish National Health Registries, Electronic Patient Records, and Clinical Quality Databases allow up-to 41 years of medical history. All individuals are genotyped using the Infinium Global Screening Array from Illumina and imputed using a reference panel consisting of whole-genome sequence data from 8429 Danes along with 7146 samples from North-Western Europe. Currently, 39 539 of the patients are deceased. FINDINGS TO DATE: Here, we demonstrate the utility of the cohort by showing concordant effects between known variants and selected CVDs, that is, >93% concordance for coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation, heart failure and cholesterol measurements and 85% concordance for hypertension. Furthermore, we evaluated multiple study designs and the validity of using Danish blood donors as part of CHB-CVDC. Lastly, CHB-CVDC has already made major contributions to studies of sick sinus syndrome and the role of phytosterols in development of atherosclerosis. FUTURE PLANS: In addition to genetics, electronic patient records, national socioeconomic and health registries extensively characterise each patient in CHB-CVDC and provides a promising framework for improved understanding of risk and protective variants. We aim to include other measurable biomarkers for example, proteins in CHB-CVDC making it a platform for multiomics cardiovascular studies