The <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpfs/">Health Professionals Follow-Up Study</a> (HPFS) is a prospective cohort study of men designed to evaluate hypotheses about men's health related to diet and lifestyle to the incidence of serious illnesses, such as cancer, heart disease, and other vascular diseases. It consisted of 51,529 U.S. male health professionals who were 40-75 years old at baseline in 1986 and completed a mailed six-page baseline questionnaire. Information on age, height, weight, ancestry, medications, disease history, physical activity, lifestyle factors, and diet were gathered, with follow-up questionnaires sent biennially to update information and record health outcomes with every four years to update their diet. Light at Night and Prostate Cancer project uses <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpfs/">HPFS</a> participants to conduct research assessing the impact of light at night on prostate cancer incidence, with follow-up from baseline in 1986 to 2016. Average annual outdoor light at night (exposure) was derived from satellite imagery data from the <a href="https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/dmsp-operational-linescan-system">US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System</a> (maintained by the <a href="https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/">National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Observation Group</a>). Prostate cancer cases (outcome) were self-reported by study participants, and then confirmed by the <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpfs/">HPFS</a> team through medical record and pathology report review. The data for this project are arranged in a long format, meaning that there are multiple rows for each subject ID. The various rows correspond to different questionnaire periods. Because the exposure in this dataset, light at night, and several important covariates are time-varying variables, the format of this dataset captures the variation in exposure status by questionnaire period. The outcome variables are incidence of prostate cancer, including incidence of prostate cancer clinical subtypes, such as advanced, aggressive, high- and low-grade prostate cancer. For the published study, please see Chowdhury-Paulino et al.'s 2023 publication in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention entitled, “Association between Outdoor Light at Night and Prostate Cancer in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.” (<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37462694/">PMID: 37462694</a>).

Light at Night and Prostate Cancer in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study

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