The LifeCycle Project-EU Child Cohort Network: a federated analysis infrastructure and harmonized data of more than 250,000 children and parents

Abstract

Early life is an important window of opportunity to improve health across the full lifecycle. An accumulating body of evidence suggests that exposure to adverse stressors during early life leads to developmental adaptations, which subsequently affect disease risk in later life. Also, geographical, socioeconomic , and ethnic differences are related to health inequalities from early life onwards. To address these important public health challenges, many European pregnancy and childhood cohorts have been established over the last 30 years. The enormous wealth of data of these cohorts has led to important new biological insights and important impact for health from early life onwards. The impact of these cohorts and their data could be further increased by combining data from different cohorts. Combining data will lead to the possibility of identifying smaller effect estimates, and the opportunity to better identify risk groups and risk factors leading to disease across the lifecycle across countries. Also, it enables research on better causal understanding and modelling of life course health trajectories. The EU Child Cohort Network, established by the Horizon2020-funded LifeCycle Project, brings together nineteen pregnancy and childhood cohorts, together including more than 250,000 children and their parents. A large set of variables has been harmonised and standardized across these cohorts. The harmonized data are kept within each institution and can be accessed by external researchers through a shared federated data analysis platform using the R-based platform DataSHIELD, which takes relevant national and international data regulations into account. The EU Child Cohort Network has an open character. All protocols for data harmonization and setting up the data analysis platform are available online. The EU Child Cohort Network creates great opportunities for researchers to use data from different cohorts, during and beyond the LifeCycle Project duration. It also provides a novel model for collaborative research in large research infrastructures with individual-level data. The LifeCycle Project will translate results from research using the EU Child Cohort Network into recommendations for targeted prevention strategies to improve health trajectories for current and future generations by optimizing their earliest phases of life.

DNA methylation and body mass index from birth to adolescence: meta-analyses of epigenome-wide association studies

“…We meta-analyzed epigenome-wide association studies of cord or whole blood methylation with childhood or adolescent body mass index (BMI). We used data from up to 4133 participants from 23 studies collaborating in the Pregnancy And Childhood Epigenetics (PACE) Consortium, LifeCycle Project, and NutriProgram Project (Additional file 1 : Table S1A-D and Additional file 2 : Supplementary Methods) [ 28 , 29 ]: ALSPAC, BAMSE, CHAMACOS, CHOP Study, CHS, DOMInO Trial, GECKO Drenthe cohort, Generation R Study, GOYA study, Healthy Start Study, HELIX, INMA, IOW F1, IOW F2, MoBa1, MoBa2, NEST, NFBC 1986, PIAMA study, PREDO study, Project Viva, Raine, and STOPPA (full names in Supplementary Methods). Cohort participants were mainly of European ancestry, but there were also cohorts with (partly) non-European ethnicities (African, Hispanic, and Aboriginals).…”

Changes in parental smoking during pregnancy and risks of adverse birth outcomes and childhood overweight in Europe and North America: An individual participant data meta-analysis of 229,000 singleton births

“…This study was part of an international LifeCycle Project (https://lifecycle-project.eu) collaboration on maternal obesity and childhood outcomes [24][25][26][27][28]. Pregnancy and birth cohort studies were eligible for inclusion if they included mothers with singleton live-born children who were born from 1989 onwards, had information available on maternal prepregnancy/earlypregnancy body mass index (BMI), and had at least one offspring measurement (birth weight or childhood BMI).…”

The effect of maternal pre-/early-pregnancy BMI and pregnancy smoking and alcohol on congenital heart diseases: a parental negative control study

“…This study was part of the Horizon2020 LifeCycle Project. LifeCycle is a collaboration of largely European birth cohorts that aims to determine the impact of early-life stressors on risk of developing adverse cardio-vascular/-metabolic, respiratory, cognitive and mental health outcomes (http://lifecycle-project.eu) 12 . A LifeCycle cohort was eligible for inclusion if it had information on CHD in the offspring ascertained by any method and data on at least one of the following: i) mother’s pre-/early-pregnancy BMI, ii) maternal smoking during pregnancy iii) maternal alcohol consumption during pregnancy, iv) exposures i-iii above measured in the father at a similar time to their pregnant partners.…”