| About www.birthcohorts.net | |
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The number of existing and planned mother-child cohorts is immense. In principle, any group of children followed over time or with a possibility to be followed up, and for whom any kind of information on their mother was collected, could create a mother-child cohort. Also, intervention studies carried out during pregnancy are potential mother-child cohorts.
The idea behind www.birthcohorts.net is to encourage collaborative studies focusing on a specific genotoxic exposure or on a specific outcome suspected to arise from gene-environment interactions. Studies of gene-environment interactions, using bio-markers, are costly, and most serious adverse health outcomes in childhood are – fortunately – rare. Since the most cost-efficient way to utilise biological samples from cohort studies is on a case-control basis, large sample sizes are required. One way to come around this problem is to establish a very large (and expensive) birth cohort.
Collaboration between already funded, established and ongoing cohorts provides, however, an attractive and feasible alternative. The existing birth cohorts are heterogeneous in design and focus, but for specific purposes data from multiple cohorts could be successfully pooled together. Advantages of this approach would be feasibility and low costs.
A prerequisite for this strategy is that the cohorts are well documented and that information about design and data on the existing cohorts is collected in a comparable form and easily accessible. This website aims to serve this purpose.
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