The goal of reaching 50,000 participants for the Canadian Longitudinal Study is close to being met, as the number of Canadians who have completed telephone or in-home interviews and data collection site visits has surpassed 45,000.

Recruitment of the final participants is expected to be wrapped up by mid-2015. At the same time, the CLSA will be starting the next wave of interviews with participants who were initially interviewed three years ago.

The study is following 50,000 men and women from across the country who were between the ages of 45 and 85 when first recruited, for 20 years. Participants have been randomly selected and are generously donating their time to provide information and biological samples that will create an invaluable resource for research on understanding the aging process and developing ways to improve the health of Canadians.

“These participants are the reason the CLSA will play an essential role in efforts to not only understand the aging process, but to also develop knowledge that can be applied in everyday life to improve quality of life as we age,” says Susan Kirkland, co-principal investigator of the CLSA and site principal investigator at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “All of the researchers and staff of the CLSA are profoundly appreciative of the cooperation and generosity of the participants.”

The CLSA involves two sets of participants – those who take part in telephone interviews, and those who take part in an in-home interview, and also visit one of the 11 data collection sites across the country to undergo physical assessments. The first wave of telephone interviews with 20,000 participants was completed in March 2014, and the data from those interviews are now available for researchers to review and apply to access. The interviews included detailed questions about physical, emotional and social health status.

More than 25,000 participants have now completed in-home interviews and visited a data collection site where they spent between two and three hours undergoing various assessments of their physical and psychological health, and provided blood and urine samples. The data from these participants will be available in 2016.

For more information on the specifics of the CLSA, visit our About the study webpage.