B3555 - The EU Child Cohort Networks core variables establishing a set of findable accessible interoperable and reusable FAIR data - 10/06/2020

B number: 
B3555
Principal applicant name: 
Angela Pinot de Moira | University of Copenhagen (United Kingdom)
Co-applicants: 
Title of project: 
The EU Child Cohort Network’s core variables: establishing a set of findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data
Proposal summary: 

LifeCycle is a cross-cohort collaboration which brings together data from pregnancy and child cohorts from across Europe and also Australia to facilitate studies on the influence of early-life exposures on cardio-metabolic, respiratory and mental health outcomes. The end product of this collaboration is a sustainable data resource known as the EU Child Cohort Network.
In the proposed paper we provide a detailed description of the EU Child Cohort Network’s core variables; a set of basic variables, derivable by the majority of participating cohorts and frequently needed as covariates in life-course research. We firstly describe the process adopted to establish a list of core variables and the protocol developed to harmonise these core data, thus making them interoperable. This protocol also defines the harmonisation process adopted generally within LifeCycle. Secondly, we describe the catalogue developed to ensure that all EU Child Cohort Network data are both findable and reusable. Finally, we describe the core data themselves, including the proportion of variables harmonised by each cohort and the number of children with harmonised data.
We would also like to provide some summary statistics (N and % for categorical variables, and N, mean, standard deviation for continuous variables) on some key variables (namely, sex, maternal education at baseline, mother’s ethnic background, mother’s parity, mother’s smoking in pregnancy, size for gestational age, whether the index child was ever breastfed, age of the mother at birth, birth weight and gestational age). These variables have already been harmonised as part of the LifeCycle project. To obtain the requested summary statistics, we have prepared some R code for individual cohorts to run on their harmonised datasets.
The paper is already written and we hope to submit it to the Journal of Epidemiology in the summer.

Impact of research: 
Date proposal received: 
Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Keywords: 
Epidemiology, LifeCycle focuses on cardiovascular, respiratory and mental health outcomes, Data harmonisation, Cross-cohort collaboration, data harmonisation