About the Authors

Farideh Sadeghian

Affiliation Department of Occupational Health, Faculty of Health, Shahroud University of Medical Sciences, Shahroud, Iran

Mehdi Raei

Affiliation Department of Biostatistics, School of Medicine, Qom University of Medical Sciences, Qom, Iran

Georgia Ntani

Affiliation Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

David Coggon

dnc@mrc.soton.ac.uk

Affiliation Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Pincipal investigator for the CUPID study in Iran, identified and recruited the study sample, oversaw data collection, and prepared the first draft of the manuscript: FS. Carried out the initial statistical analysis: MR. Carried out further statistical analysis and helped in revision of the draft manuscript: GN. Conceived and designed the CUPID study, advised on data collection, and revised the draft manuscript: DC. Approved the final manuscript: DC FS MR GN. Conceived and designed the experiments: FS DC. Performed the experiments: FS. Analyzed the data: MR GN. Wrote the paper: FS DC.