Other phenotype data

National health registers offer valuable lifelong healthcare data for addressing disease progression. Yet, they lack quantitative measures such as biomarkers and lifestyle information. To enhance disease trajectory quality, FinnGen has supplemented this with additional phenotype data, including clinical and questionnaire data from a subset of individuals.

The majority of the phenotypic data of the FinnGen study subjects comes from the national health registers. However, some sample donor related data, not captured by the national registers, have been obtained through the biobanks. These include for instance the so-called “minimum phenotype data” which consist of BMI, time of sampling, and smoking status (yes/no, current/former/never, current/occasional/quitter/former/never). The minimum phenotype data is available to all FinnGen study participants, excluding the smoking history which is available for a subset of the sample donors.

FinnGen has also acquired additional blood donation related data from the Blood Service Biobank’s FinnGen study subjects. This data includes eg. the number of blood donations and haemoglobin levels at the time of donation and is available for 31,000 study subjects.

In addition to the minimum phenotype data, FinnGen has also acquired, for a limited set of individuals, additional clinical data related to certain prioritised diseases (Expansion Area 3), health questionnaire data (Expansion Area 2) and recontacting data (Expansion Area 6) part of the FinnGen Expansion Area pilots during FinnGen 2.

The clinical data extracted in the Expansion Area 3 studies are listed here.