Historical Facts on KORA and MONICA
In the cardiovascular study of the World Health Organization (WHO) named MONICA (monitoring trends and determinants in cardiovascular disease), that was to be conducted for a period of 10 years in centers around the world, Augsburg (i.e. the city of Augsburg, the rural district of Augsburg and of Aichach-Friedberg) was chosen as study region and to participate as being representative of the German population. The MONICA Project was aimed to register all cases of fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular diseases in clearly defined study areas under standardized collection conditions and make them visible over time and correlate them to various factors. To this end the project was implemented with two study types existing in parallel at every study center: a) the cross-sectional studies (surveys) which were carried out with random samples of the study population three times during the study period (i.e. from 1984 to 1995), and b) the Myocardial Infarction Registry, where every myocardial infarction occurring in the study region during the study period was continuously registered.
In the cross-sectional studies the correlation of various risk factors to myocardial infarction, as e.g., smoking, hypertension, elevated blood lipids, and obesity were investigated. The task of the Myocardial Infarction Registry was to map the annually occurring myocardial infarctions and to depict the medical care for those affected in the study region.
The Myocardial Infarction Registry was created in 1984 by the GSF Research Center for Environment and Health (today’s Helmholtz Zentrum München) as part of the MONICA project. Since then it has registered continuously every myocardial infarction in men and women aged 25 to 74 years having their main residence in the study region and having been hospitalized in one of the seven hospitals within the Augsburg study area or the two hospitals in adjacent areas.
Due to the high scientific rating of the data collected in the frame of the MONICA survey until 1995 and with nearly every MI patient participating, the cross-sectional studies and the Myocardial Infarction Registry were continued as from 1996 and are still an integral part of the cooperative health research in the region of Augsburg (KORA).