The overall aim of this project is to evaluate existing techniques and develop new ones for investigating associations between diet and disease from nutritional data. Furthermore, potential pathways of diet with chronic diseases such as asthma will be explored.

Specific Objectives:

1. To evaluate existing data-driven methods for empirically derived dietary patterns in nutritional epidemiology.

2. To investigate and develop new statistical methods for analyzing nutritional data derived from other fields of research.

3. To explore causal pathways of diet with chronic diseases such as asthma and obesity.

Objective 1-2 will asess the performance of existing data-driven techniques in nutritional epidemiology and newly developed ones with the use of simulation studies. In order to do that, we will create a hypothetical population in which food intake derived from the ALSPAC food frequency questionnaire could be related to disease under the conditions that we control for and in a way that we could specify in terms of relative risks.

Objective 3 will use the ALSPAC data for identifying potential pathways between diet and asthma, allergy with the use of Causal models.

Exposure Variables: Food Frequency Data

Outcome Variables: Self-reported data on asthma and allergy , Lung function measurements

Confounding variables: energy intake, smoking status, infections, antibiotics and paracetamol use; educational level, housing tenure, financial difficulties, pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI), ethnicity, age, parity, history of asthma, eczema; sex of child, gestational age, breast fed in first 6 months, day care at 8 months, multiple pregnancy, pets in infancy, damp/condensation/mould, child exposed to environmental tobacco smoke at weekends, season of birth, season of FFQ completion, birth weight, head circumference, birth length