Rotterdam Study (Rotterdam Scan Study)

The Rotterdam Study is a prospective population-based cohort run by Erasmus MC in the Ommoord district of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It follows middle-aged and older residents to find causes and early markers of common diseases of ageing. Its brain imaging arm, the Rotterdam Scan Study, scans participants repeatedly so that brain changes can be related to later dementia, stroke and cognitive decline, which the cohort tracks through linkage with medical records.

Composition

The cohort started in 1990 with 7,983 people aged 55 and over, added 3,011 people in 2000 and 3,932 people aged 45 and over in 2006, for 14,926 participants by 2008. An extension of people aged 40 and over began in 2016. Random subsets had brain MRI in 1995 and 1999 (567 people); from 2005 brain MRI became part of the core protocol for everyone without contraindications or claustrophobia. By July 2015 there were 12,174 brain scans in over 5,800 people, and the 2020 design update reports more than 12,000 scans in over 8,000 people. Some participants have four or more MRI visits. The same cohort has CT of arterial calcification (2,500 people), carotid MRI (over 1,500) and knee MRI (over 800). A dementia study on diffusion MRI of 4,415 non-demented participants found 101 incident dementia cases.

Acquisition

Since 2005 brain MRI runs on one dedicated GE 1.5 T scanner with an 8-channel head coil, kept without software or hardware upgrades for comparability. The protocol has 3D T1-weighted, proton-density, FLAIR, 3D T2*-weighted gradient echo for microbleeds, 25-direction diffusion tensor imaging and phase-contrast flow for total cerebral blood flow. Resting-state fMRI was added in mid-2011. Scanner details for the carotid and knee MRI are not given in the papers read. The 2020 update describes florbetaben amyloid PET in 700 participants as ongoing since 2018 and a planned 7 T substudy of 200 participants; neither is listed as collected here.

Annotations

Automated tissue, white matter lesion and hippocampus segmentations are checked visually. Trained physicians rate infarcts, microbleeds, perivascular spaces and incidental findings.

Known limitations

• Images are not public. Data are released on request through the study management team under an unpublished approval protocol.
• Subject counts are lower bounds taken from "over N" statements; per-sequence counts are not published.
• The cohort comes from one district of one Dutch city.