Pre-eclampsia is a common pregnancy complication and is one of the leading causes of death and injury to mothers and their babies worldwide. Pre-eclampsia occurs in the second half of pregnancy and is characterised by high blood pressure and protein in the urine. We do not fully understand why some women get this condition, but the function and leakiness of small blood vessels (capillaries) is important.

The glycocalyx, is a very thin gel-like layer which is found on the wall of all blood vessels. It seems to act as a barrier, controlling how much water remains inside the blood vessel. Researchers have recently started looking at the glycocalyx and have found in other conditions which cause leaky blood vessels (e.g. diabetes and kidney disease), the glycocalyx appears damaged.

Recently we have completed work to show that glycocalyx is not only present in blood vessels, but also the human placenta. We have done this by staining placenta with different proteins called lectins. These bind to the sugary glycocalyx, and when labelled with a fluorescent dye glow green under the microscope. We compare this green stain to a red membrane stain and can measure the depth of the glycocalyx.

We suspect that the glycocalyx is damaged in pre-eclampsia, like in other diseases.

ALSPAC offers an excellent resource of placental tissue, however, many of these specimens have been stored for a number of years and we know the glycocalyx can be a fragile structure. We propose a feasibility experiment, whereby the research team could look a small selection of ALSPAC placentas to examine if the glycocalyx has been preserved and can still be measured.

Poor quality diet is associated with increased risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, many forms of cancer and mental illness. Poor quality diet is the top contributor to mortality globally, and is estimated to cost the NHS £6billion per year.
The period of adolescence to early adulthood is the time when prevalence of overweight and obesity develops most rapidly, making this an important time to understand the contribution of diet to these developing risk factors. Adolescence and early adulthood is a time of rapid personal development and changing lifestyles. It also is the time when adult behaviours, including adult dietary patterns, are developed and established. Understanding the factors that influence development of adult diet is an important first step in developing strategies to change behaviour.
However, there has been little assessment of diet in young adults. Online tools (INTAKE24) are now available that make reporting on nutritional intake easier, allowing online completion of recalls of daily intake, and automated data processing. These validated tools make the collection of diet data in large samples more feasible, and are now being implemented in large-scale dietary surveys across many countries by researchers at the MRC Epidemiology Unit.
This application focusses on assessing the diet of young adults (age 28-30) in the ALSPAC cohort. This data will then be used together with other data collected within ALSPAC, or from linked datasets, to understand (1) the changes in environment and lifestyle which help to explain why individuals have adopted their current diets, and (2) the relationships between diet and measures of heart and blood health. The data will also be available for further research studying associations between diet at age 30 years and longer term measures of health and disease.

Mercury (Hg) is an environmental pollutant that can persist and bio-accumulates as methylmercury (MeHg) through the food chain. Foetuses are especially vulnerable to prenatal exposure since mercury can cross the placental barrier and the blood brain barrier is not fully developed until several months after birth. Prenatal exposure to Hg has been associated with impaired foetus development, such as reduced placental functioning and foetal growth. Prenatal exposure to Hg has also been associated with effects on child neuropsychological development. The specific mechanisms of toxicity related to these associations remain unclear, although some research has suggested that dramatic DNA methylation changes and epigenetic remodelling during early embryogenesis could be involved. Thus, cells and tissues acquire new methylation patterns that may persist in foetal development and childhood. To date, only three studies have been conducted relating Hg and epigenome-wide DNA methylation in cord blood with sample sizes between 138 and 321. These studies have identified altered expression in unique genomic regions as well as methylation changes in specific CpG sites. This study proposes to to investigate the association between prenatal Hg exposure and epigenome-wide methylation.

Maltreatment (physical, sexual and emotional abuse and neglect) in childhood is common and has both immediate and long-lasting negative effects. People who suffer maltreatment have a higher risk of many health conditions, including obesity, heart attack and stroke. However, it is not well understood why this is the case and at what age ill health starts to manifest. Unhealthy eating, smoking, physical inactivity and inadequate sleep may play a role in this relationship, but mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression, inflammation and other biological factors can also be involved. These factors might have separate effects but also act together, and these mechanisms might differ between men and women. This research aims to understand when the cardiovascular consequences of maltreatment appear, the pathways that link childhood maltreatment to heart disease in later life and whether these mechanisms differ by sex. This will help to identify potential targets for interventions to prevent heart disease in those who suffered maltreatment. We will use data from several British studies (ALSPAC, UK Biobank, the 1958 British Birth Cohort, Millennium Cohort and Growing up in Scotland), that have assessed maltreatment in early life and have measures of cardiovascular health indicators at different ages to understand when, why and how people who suffered maltreatment in childhood have a higher risk of heart disease in later life.

This proposal will look to obtain DNA samples from ALSPAC participant (G1) family members, including fathers and siblings.

A consensus of research has demonstrated that stress and adversity can become embodied and transmitted across generations, creating pathways by which social and economic inequality can affect human biology and health for decades. Most research has identified fetal development as a sensitive period for this transmission of stress from mother to child, with considerably less research on the postnatal period. Maternal postnatal stress has been found to shape infant stress response development, potentially creating a pathway by which maternal stress can become embodied in the next generation and influence how the next generation responds to and handles stressors. However, it is not clear how these effects on the stress response become embodied and whether these changes persist through childhood. This study proposes to test whether maternal postnatal stress in her child’s infancy and toddlerhood is related to the child’s methylation of stress-response related genes at age 7.

Similarly, previous research has demonstrated a relationship between psychosocial stress and childhood growth in weight and height. However, this relationship has been inconsistently demonstrated and the pathways by which stress affects growth are not clear. While the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis has been implicated in this relationship, results have been inconsistent. This research project proposes to test the relationship between growth velocity throughout childhood and methylation of HPA-axis related genes at age 7, in order to determine whether alterations to stress response physiology are a mechanism by which stress can affect growth.

What a mother eats during pregnancy has previously been established to programme their infants health in later live, even tracking through to adulthood. However, despite compelling evidence to support foetal programming of physical health, neurodevelopment has remained understudied. Recently, autism has gained increased attention within this field of research. Although largely caused by genetic factors, it is now estimated that approximately 20% of the risk of developing autism relates to environmental factors, of which nutrition is a main focus. Preliminary evidence indicates that the risk of developing autism may be reduced through consumption of a nutritionally adequate diet or nutritional supplements. Furthermore, the presence of social patterning is unknown. Health inequities are observed in numerous health outcomes as low socioeconomic position groups experience more adversity including poorer diet quality. Thus, it is possible that, where an association existed between maternal diet and their child’s risk of autism, it may also be socially patterned.

Two datasets will be compared for this project, ALSPAC and a second dataset called the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study. The data from each cohort will be analysed in the same way.
This project will apply statistical methods that estimate if there is an association between maternal nutritional intake during pregnancy and the child’s risk of developing autism. The project will apply ‘causal methods’ which are statistical methods which better estimate causal relationships from observation data when compared to conventional methods with measure ‘association’. A key way in which this occurs is through adjusting for confounders which vary over time, such as early infant nutrition. Both pregnancy and early infant nutrition such as breastfeeding, complementary feeding and nutrition in the early years have been associated with neurodevelopment and so the effects measured in pregnancy may be further altered by nutrition consumed in childhood. Lastly, results will be stratified by socioeconomic position to more clearly assess the presence and the degree of social patterning in this relationship.

Rare copy number variants (CNVs) are strongly associated with neuropsychiatric disorders, suggesting that they might serve as a magnifying glass to study general mechanisms of psychopathology as otherwise subtle perturbations to neuropsychiatric functions may be more clearly discerned through the major ‘hit’ of the CNV. However, our understanding of the impact of CNVs on psychiatric symptomatology, RDoC domains and neurocognitive ability (termed ‘dimensional neuropsychiatric phenotypes’) is limited in at least three ways. First, the effects sizes of the vast majority of CNVs on neuropsychiatric phenotypes remain poorly understood and their rarity will likely to prevent individual association studies. Prior studies concentrated on the most recurrent CNVs, leaving more than 90% of these variants undocumented. Second, for CNVs frequent enough to be studied individually, the full spectrum of phenotypic variation is unknown because ascertainment has been performed through neurodevelopmental and specialty clinics, which presumably represent the severe end of the phenotypic spectrum. Only a few studies have been conducted in unselected populations. Finally, many CNVs seem to impact the same neuropsychiatric domains, suggesting a poly/omnigenic model for psychiatric symptomatology, RDoC domains and neurocognitive ability. Based on this hypothesis, our previous work has shown that genetic scores and functional annotations can accurately predict the effect of any CNV on IQ but these approaches have not yet been extended beyond IQ to other dimensional neuropsychiatric phenotypes. We will fill these knowledge gaps with a novel, multidisciplinary, collaborative project that leverages existing archival data (n=255,303) to estimate and predict the effect sizes of CNVs (duplications and deletions) on dimensional neuropsychiatric phenotypes. Our aims include 1) phenotypic harmonization; 2) characterizing previously identified risk CNVs for mental illness in a large in general population cohorts and in samples ascertained for mental illnesses; 3) examine the contribution of common variants to variable expressivity of rare CNVs via polygenic risk scores (PRS) in the domains of mood, psychosis, developmental disability, and general cognitive ability; and 4) develop novel models to explain the effect size of any rare CNVs on dimensional neuropsychiatric phenotypes. Finally, we will develop tools for data sharing.

EpiTIME aims to shine a light on the newly discovered epigenetic ‘time puzzle’ of child mental health. Recently, it has been observed that common mental health problems in children, such as inattention-hyperactivity and impulse-control problems, are most strongly predicted by epigenetic patterns regulating gene expression at birth – a signal that is curiously lost when measuring these same patterns later in childhood. Such a finding points to the existence of an early biologically-sensitive developmental window and may provide us with crucial insights into the nature and origins of mental health outcomes in children. Yet, how these epigenetic timing effects arise, what factors drive them and why they manifest is currently a puzzle. To solve it, this project will combine (i) the application of innovative, multidisciplinary approaches and (ii) the generation of new data within a unique set of European longitudinal cohorts to systematically characterize, locate and explain epigenetic timing effects on child mental health with unprecedented scale and depth. As well as addressing a major knowledge gap and advancing research at the forefront of biological and psychological sciences, EpiTIME has the potential to set in motion a paradigm shift in the way that we conceptualize, understand and approach mental health in children.