The Białystok PLUS investigates many systems, with the major emphasis on the most common diseases associated with modern lifestyle (civilization diseases): cardiovascular, metabolic and endocrine, neurodegenerative, neoplastic and pulmonary. We believe that there are many interactions between them that might be missed when not analyzed together. Apart from those most common diseases other are also being analyzed, including allergies, airway dysfunction – both upper and lower, gastrointestinal disorders, eye diseases. There may be many common underlying mechanisms of the diseases that now seem to be distant and independent, because of insufficient knowledge.

Bialystok PLUS study describes the current health status of population providing valuable information both about the development of the diseases but also about psychological and sociological background that may affect them. It combines a number of features to create a highly innovative project. They include the population representativeness, comprehensive, multidimensional and interdisciplinary approach as well as the longitudinal observation. The population representativeness and the comparability of data with other cohorts will generate knowledge of the risk-factors, disease burden and healthcare indicators in the Northeast Poland population of adults. 

One of the objectives of this project is to obtain comprehensive information on the health status (including subclinical disorders), genomics, risk factors, health behavior and sociodemographic data from large, representative sample of population of Białystok city inhabitants. Health status assessment refers to many areas of medicine and includes clinical data, medical images, as well as biological samples. We combine imaging (fundoscopy, ultrasound examinations of heart, vessels, thyroid, liver, gallbladder) with state of the art functional studies (AGE measurement, pulse wave velocity, central pressure, plethysmography with the analysis of DLCO and NO concentration, spiroergometry, OGTT). The study is designed as prospective, so in the future, additional information on occurrence of diseases or deaths will allow to estimate disease incidence, morbidity or mortality in studied population.