Birth/pregnancy cohorts are studies that recruit mothers during pregnancy or parents and their children at the time the child is first born and collect important health and wellbeing data on them across all of their life, if possible to obtain grant funds to do so. They are very important to understand how where we come from (e.g. what jobs are parents do, which country and city we were born in), what we are exposed to (for example traffic fumes), what we do (e.g. what we eat, how much exercise we do, how well we do at school) and our biological make up (e.g. genetics and epigenetics) act together to influence whether we live a long healthy life, or have health problems and also how well we feel in ourselves and what we go on to do (what job we have as an adult, how many children we have etc.). They are also useful for seeing how large scale things like the global economic crisis can affect health and wellbing.
In Europe there are lots of such cohorts, including the Avon Longitudinal Study of Patents and Children (ALSPAC; also known as Children of the 90s), which is considered to be one of the best of these types of studies. Each of these studies alone have increased our knowledge of what causes some people to be well and others not and what things are important for general wellbeing. But together they can achieve a lot more. We want to bring these cohorts together in order to better understand how what happens to us when we are in the uterus (when our mothers are pregnant) and what happens to us at birth and early childhood influences how we grow, how fat or thin we are, whether we have risk factors for heart disease, diabetes, asthma or other breathing problem, depression, schizophrenia or other mental health problems. By putting all of these cohorts together we will also be able to determine what early life risk factors affect getting diseases in later adulthood.