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Background: We established a community-based cohort study to assess the long-term impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake on disaster victims and gene-environment interactions on the incidence of major diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Methods: We asked participants to join our cohort in the health check-up settings and assessment center based settings. Inclusion criteria were aged 20 years or over and living in Miyagi or Iwate Prefecture. We obtained information on lifestyle, effect of disaster, blood, and urine information (Type 1 survey), and some detailed measurements (Type 2 survey), such as carotid echography and calcaneal ultrasound bone mineral density. All participants agreed to measure genome information and to distribute their information widely. Results: As a result, 87,865 gave their informed consent to join our study. Participation rate at health check-up site was about 70%. The participants in the Type 1 survey were more likely to have psychological distress than those in the Type 2 survey, and women were more likely to have psychological distress than men. Additionally, coastal residents were more likely to have higher degrees of psychological distress than inland residents, regardless of sex. Conclusion: This cohort comprised a large sample size and it contains information on the natural disaster, genome information, and metabolome information. This cohort also had several detailed measurements. Using this cohort enabled us to clarify the long-term effect of the disaster and also to establish personalized prevention based on genome, metabolome, and other omics information.

A novel measurement system consisting of scanning electron microscopy and infrared (IR) thermography has been constructed to measure the thermal conductivity and the thermal diffusivity on a micro-/nanometer scale. In this study, we measured them for a stainless-steel wire with a diameter of 50 μm to demonstrate the validity of our system. The time evolution of temperature distribution on the whole of the stainless-steel wire was recorded by the IR thermograph when the wire was irradiated by the electron beam (EB). A time response of the wire temperature corresponding to the on/off of the EB irradiation was clearly observed, indicating that local EB heating was realized. In addition, the experimental time evolution of temperature at its transient phenomena was in good agreement with the theoretical calculation based on a one-dimensional (1D) equivalent-circuit model of heat flow coupled with electric current, where the thermal parameters, such as thermal conductivity and heat capacitance, were set to bulk values. Therefore, it can be concluded that our system is valid to evaluate the thermal conductivity of the 1D wire sample. For evaluating the thermal diffusivity of the wire sample, we applied a periodic EB irradiation by a rectangular wave with a frequency of 0.25 Hz. The thermal diffusivity was evaluated to be (2.8 ± 0.6) × 10−5 m2 s−1, which was seven times as large as that of bulk stainless steel. Our system can be applied to an AC calorimetry method for a 1D system sample after the analysis procedure is further modified.