Proposal summaries
B3471 - Using novel data collection approaches to enhance the ALSPAC resource - 20/03/2020
Cohorts like ALSPAC typically collect data on their participants over several years, but since data collection is usually both expensive and burdensome these data collection events tend to take place every few years, measuring or recording information at a particular instance in time e.g. via questionnaires or clinic visits. Hence, these data contain a limited amount of information on phenotypic variability across the life-course, and restricts the research questions that can be asked using these data. There is much more scope to exploit existing and emerging technologies to collect data âcontinuouslyâ over the longer term in cost-effective and less burdensome ways.
Digital health devices have been successfully used to collect data on specific traits over a number of days (e.g. physical activity measured with accelerometers), but these devices tend to each focus on particular traits such that collecting data in this way is expensive (having to buy specific devices to collect specific phenotypes), and many types of phenotypes do not lend themselves to this type of data collection, in particular, those that can only (currently) be collected via self-report. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and voice recognition technologies means it is now feasible to use voice-based systems to collect self-reported data continuously over several days or weeks in a less burdensome way. However, to date, voice-based data collection has not been used in epidemiology.
A second potentially valuable source of data comes from our pervasive use of the world wide web (the âwebâ). ALSPAC has included items in questionnaires (e.g. âHave you sought help or advice regarding your sex life from the internet in the last year?â), but collecting web usage information passively using a technological approach over a potentially long period of time (weeks, months or even years), has the potential to provide a very large and currently untapped source of health-related information, if collected in ALSPAC.
In this study we aim to assess feasibility and acceptability of a voice-based approach to data collection and passive collection of web usage data. We then plan to collect these data in ALSPAC participants.
B3484 - The mediating effect of inflammation on the association between genetic risk for psychiatric disorders and psychiatric outcomes - 24/03/2020
Inflammation has been implicated as a potential mechanism in the development of psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and major depressive disorder (MDD). However, it is not fully understood whether inflammation causes mental illness, whether behaviours associated with mental illness cause increased inflammation, or whether mental illness and inflammation share common risk factors. This project therefore aims to i) investigate whether genetic risk for psychiatric disorders is associated with inflammation and ii) investigate whether inflammation explains the associations between genetic risk for psychiatric disorders and mental health outcomes in adolescence and early adulthood.
Results of this project will further improve our understanding of the role of inflammation in pathways to mental ill health.
B3483 - Assciations between eating behaviours and body mass index in the ALSPAC cohort at 25 - 16/03/2020
Eating behaviours describe how people eat rather than what they eat. We believe that some current, common eating behaviours are part of the problem causing an increase in obesity levels in the UK and elsewhere. We put some questions in to the ALSPAC questionnaire for participants aged 25 years that asked about how fast they ate their meals, with whom and in front of what items if any of technology (such as computers, TV etc.). We will examine this information to see if any such behaviours tend towards increased body mass index in the cohort. This information may add to our clinical advice when counselling people with excess weight how to lose or maintain weight loss.
B3481 - The relationship between socioeconomic deprivation psychiatric distress and persistence of smoking in pregnant women - 10/03/2020
Only a small proportion of pregnant individuals will continue to smoke during their pregnancy. Identifying the key traits which predict this behaviour will allow the development of more efficient screening procedures and interventions for this vulnerable group, improving outcomes for both mother and foetus. While both psychological vulnerabilities (such as depression) and socioeconomic risk factors (such as material deprivation) have been considered individually in their relationship with smoking during pregnancy, the relative importance of psychological versus socioeconomic factors has not been determined. In addition, very few studies have considered the complex inter-relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and psychological wellbeing, and how these might contribute to smoking in pregnancy. The purpose of the present project is to use the ALSPAC dataset to address these two issues. Pregnant women in this dataset will be classed as either continuing smokers (smoked prior to pregnancy and continued during second and/or third trimesters), quit smokers (smoked prior to pregnancy but not during second or third trimesters), and never smokers (did not smoke prior to pregnancy or during pregnancy). Differences between these groups in psychological variables (depression, anxiety, and experience of stressful events during pregnancy) and socioeconomic variables (educational attainment, financial difficulties and neighbourhood deprivation) will be tested using multiple logistic regression. The second phase of this project will use network outcome analysis to map the complex inter-relationships between psychological and socioeconomic risk factors and smoking in pregnancy. This will allow us to identify the best targets for intervention.
B3479 - The determinants and burden of gastrointestinal infection a tale of two generations - 10/03/2020
Gastrointestinal infections are common, with 1 in 4 people in the UK population experiencing an episode each year, which causes an estimated annual cost to the individuals, the National Health Service and the wider economy of £1.5 billion. This research will take a life-course approach to the assessment of the causes and consequences of gastrointestinal infections in the community, from early childhood into early adulthood â continuing into the next generation (ALSPAC-G2 study: Children of the Children of the 90s). This will allow us to provide important insights into changes in causes and consequences of gastrointestinal infections across the individual life-course but also over time at the population level. The findings can then inform public health interventions to reduce the burden of gastrointestinal infections, especially among the most vulnerable groups.
B3480 - The Maternal Diet Diversity Index during Pregnancy and Allergy outcomes in the child - 10/03/2020
What mothers eat during pregnancy may affect the development of allergy in their babies and children. This study will use data from two cohorts: the Healthy Start cohort and the ALSPAC cohort. The study will learn if a novel comprehensive measure of maternal diet during pregnancy affects development of eczema, food allergy, seasonal allergies/hay fever/allergic rhinitis and asthma in chidden. The new knowledge will help families and clinicians to eventually prevent the onset and progression of allergy.
B3477 - At the intersection of autism and psychosis An investigation of causal pathways developmental trajectories and phenotypic outc - 03/03/2020
Autism is a chronic condition, arising early in childhood and characterized by two main symptoms: difficulties in social communication/interactions and repetitive behaviours. Sometimes, people with autism also have psychotic illness (e.g. hearing voices or feeling paranoid). The reasons this happens is still unknown. There are several possible explanations:
a. Specific autism-related symptoms, such as repetitive behaviours and restricted interests, might be risk factors for developing psychosis later in life,
b. Genetics of autism might predispose the affected individuals to psychosis later in life,
c. Adverse life events, frequently occurring in people with autism, such as stigmatisation or bullying, might lead to psychosis.
We will investigate these explanations using genetic, clinic and questionnaire data from the ALSPAC cohort. Understanding the reasons why some people with autism develop psychosis is an important step towards developing appropriate prevention strategies and offer adequate psychosocial support to the affected individuals and their families.
B3476 - Validating the CIS-R for use as an online tool - 06/03/2020
The Clinical Interview Schedule â Revised (CIS-R) is a structured diagnostic measure developed from the Clinical Interview Schedule (CIS), a standardised interview designed to assess common mental disorders among community settings. The CIS was designed for use by clinical interviewers and required expert judgement to determine psychopathology. The CIS was standardised to enable interviewers without this expert knowledge to administer, the resulting CIS-R can thus be self-completed and returns results comparable to those from standardized interviews. The CIS-R has been validated across a number of populations and ages, and studies suggest that the instrument remains valid across a number of cultural settings and age groups. To date, little work has been done to validate the CIS-R administered using different modes of assessment.
Previously the CIS-R has been administered to ALSPAC participants via a computerised assessment during clinic time. To minimise participant burden during clinic time and maximise response rate to the CIS-R, it has been suggested that the assessment could be completed online, outside of the clinic. The CIS-R has not currently been validated as an online task, therefore we propose to investigate whether responses to this measure differ according to the setting in which it is completed, and whether it remains a valid diagnostic measure when completed online outside of the clinic setting.
B3475 - Teachers psychological processes - 05/03/2020
Despite the common belief that teachers can impact various aspects of students' lives, the empirical evidence on the breadth and strength of their influence is relatively unclear. This project aims to examine the relative strength of the influence of teachers' characteristics and behaviours as perceived by multiple raters (i.e., teachers themselves, students, and parents) on multiple experiences and outcomes associated with the teacher (e.g., job satisfaction) and their students (e.g., academic achievement).
B3474 - Exploration of the relationship between social cognition and PTSD within the ALSPAC cohort - 26/02/2020
Social cognition has been hypothesised to be important in the development of PTSD (1). Previous research has shown that individuals with PTSD have a variety of social cognitive deficits (2), but whether these existed prior to the development of PTSD has not yet been determined. Furthermore, it is not clear whether social cognitive deficits increase risk of trauma exposure, whether trauma causes social cognitive deficits, and whether social cognitive deficits mediate or moderate the relationship between trauma and PTSD
B3473 - Metabolomic quality control and association analyses - 24/02/2020
Metabolites are the ultimate end-point of a biological process and are therefore seen as a link between genotype and phenotype. Assigning individual metabolite changes to diseases is difficult because of the complexity of their interrelationships. Prior to analysis quality control of metabolomics data is required. We have developed a package that automates these quality control steps. We will use the raw metabolomic data as a use case for our package.
Body composition is known to affect metabolite concentrations. These changes may be implicated in disease development. Following quality control we will use the metabolomic data to investigate the relationship between metabolites and different body composition traits.
B3472 - Are knee DXA biomarkers related to lower limb biomechanics and gait in women with and without knee osteoarthritis - 05/03/2020
B3470 - predicting asthma beyond childhood - 18/02/2020
using same principle of pediatric asthma risk scores to predict asthma in childhood I have created risk factors to predict asthma at age 18 and 26 years old
B3465 - Genetic and Environmental Components of Parental Effects on Child Physical and Mental Health - 18/02/2020
Ultimately, the similarity between parents and their children can come from two sources: nature and nurture. Recently, methods have been introduced to identify the effects of âgenetic nurtureâ - effects of the parentally-provided environment which can be explained by the parentsâ genes through their influences on parental behavior (rather than through genetic transmission to their children). We have developed an extension of these methods which may allow us to find specific genetic factors which make up this effect, for nuclear families with genotype data available on at least 2 members (e.g., sibling pairs or parent-offspring pairs). This method involves imputing missing parental genotypes from the available genotypes of each nuclear family. Because of its detailed longitudinal phenotype data and genotyped mothers and children, ALSPAC is an ideal dataset to examine these effects across a number of traits important to human health and disease. The results of this study will better help us understand the important role of the parental environment in childhood development and identify specific genetic and environmental risk factors (and their interaction) for physical and mental health outcomes in children.
B3469 - Menstruation and womens health - 17/02/2020
There has been remarkably little research on women's experience of menstruation from a population health perspective, despite menstruation and pre-menstrual symptoms having wide-reaching consequences for women's physical and mental health. We need a better understanding of the biological (e.g. hormone levels, epigenetics) and lifestyle factors (e.g. smoking, alcohol, diet) that might predict and/or causally affect menstrual experiences (e.g. cycle length, heaviness, regularity, pain and premenstrual mood). This better understanding could inform ways to predict who is at risk of poor experiences, and develop strategies to prevent or improve those experiences. We also need a better understanding of the impact of different menstrual experiences on women's physical and mental health (e.g. fatigue, depression, life satisfaction). Again, this could inform strategies to predict which women are at risk of poor outcomes and help develop preventative interventions.
B3468 - Profiling the occupational and educational trajectories of individuals with special educational needs and disabilities - 17/02/2020
Educational and career decisions for school leavers are complex and influenced by multiple factors. These can include: factors at the level of an individual, such as cognitive abilities, motivations and self-beliefs; factors related to the family environment, such as parental education and beliefs, and family income; factors relating to the school setting, such as type of schooling; and finally factors relating to the broader economic and cultural context. These factors, besides having a direct and specific impact on individuals' educational and professional path, interact in complex ways. For individuals with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), education and career decisions are likely to be even more complex, and we know that career advice for individuals with SEND is often patchy and incomplete.
In order to gain a thorough understanding of the factors involved in the post-secondary educational and occupational choices of individuals with SEND, we plan to combine two complementary data analysis techniques: a variable centred approach, which examines which variables play an important role in predicting outcome across the range, and a person centred approach, which is focused on a holistic analysis of the combined effect of multilevel factors. This allows us to understand whether there are different profiles of individuals with SEND who show different post-secondary choices.
B3467 - SoCial Reserve as buffer against psychosis development a psychological and molecular investigation SCORE - 03/03/2020
Social withdrawal (SocW) â defined as reduced social interaction â is a key feature of psychotic disorders and multiple other psychiatric outcomes. Despite growing recognition of its negative consequences, SocW remains one of the least studied human traits, and its underlying mechanisms remain subject of wide speculation. The overall goal of this project is to examine elucidate the role of SocW in the development of psychosis.
By combining clinical data with increasingly powerful âgenetic risk scoresâ (i.e. the sum of risk genes that have shown to be associated with a behavioral trait), we are now able to test whether SocW is a cause or merely a consequence of symptoms in psychosis development. Using the UK Biobank we will create a powerful genetic risk score for SocW, and use this score to examine the role of SocW in psychosis in two large developmental cohorts: The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) and Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC). Jointly, these studies followed nearly 16,000 young individuals from childhood to young adulthood, through ages encompassing typical onset of and peak onset age of psychosis. In ALSPAC, we will also test the association between changes in psychotic symptoms and changes in SocW behaviorally, and explore the effects of SocW and established environmental risk in the path to psychosis.
Overall, we aspire to better understand the well-established association between SocW and psychosis, determine critical windows during which individuals may be more or less prone to the influence of SocW, and facilitate much-needed preventive targeted therapies.
B3464 - Anxiety and mood disorders in young people a multivariate approach using the ALSPAC cohort - 12/02/2020
In this project, we will investigate the early life psychological, environmental and biological factors that may increase the risk of developing mood disorders (broadly defined) in late adolescence and early adulthood and the associated poor outcomes. Multi-factorial analyses will examine prospective impacts of diet, sleep, parental mental health, cognitive function, inflammatory markers, metabolomics and genetic susceptibility on the earliest symptoms of mood disorder.
B3466 - Investigating maternal cannabis exposure during pregnancy and epigenetic alterations in offspring - 12/02/2020
Cannabis is widely used for recreational and medical purposes with usage increasing rapidly following its legalization in parts of the world[1]. While there are well-documented effects of cannabis on the users themselves, the impact of its consumption during pregnancy on offspring is much less clear. Previous studies have reported that maternal cannabis usage during pregnancy is associated with lower birth weight and there is the suggestion of impaired neurodevelopment in both observational cohorts in humans and experimental studies in animal models[2-7]. However, how maternal cannabis exposure leads to these adverse health outcomes in offspring remains unclear.
Epigenetic mechanisms play an important role in regulating gene expression and cell homeostasis. Previous experimental studies showed that DNA methylation in offspring could be modified by maternal cannabis exposure[8-10]. In some cases this leads to dysregulation of the immune system of the fetus[11-13]. However, no human studies have yet been conducted, and no specific epigenetic signatures have been identified related to cannabis exposures. We hypothesize that maternal cannabis exposure during pregnancy alters the epigenetic profiles and leads to a specific epigenetic signature of the fetus through in utero exposure, and the epigenetic alterations can then lead to impaired neurodevelopment in the offspring. Therefore, we propose to investigate the association of maternal cannabis exposure around the time of pregnancy with DNA methylation profiles in offspring at birth in the ALSPC cohort.
B3458 - Indoor and outdoor tanning determinants in British young adults - 11/02/2020
Ultraviolet radiation (UVR) is the most important risk factor for skin cancer. Indoor tanning, defined as the use of an ultraviolet emission device to produce a cosmetic tan[1], has been associated with increased risk of melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC), and thus has been classified as a group I carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer[2]. Despite the risk posed by this activity, indoor tanning is common practice among young people in developed countries. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 12 studies of indoor tanning and NMSC showed that ever exposure to indoor tanning was associated with a higher risk of both, squamous cell carcinoma and basal cell carcinoma, and that exposure at a young age (< 25 years of age) increased these risks considerably[1]. Similarly, melanoma risk was significantly higher due to sunbed use, as reported by a systematic review and meta-analysis of 27 observational studies[3]. Since indoor tanning is a potentially modifiable exposure it is of interest to examine its frequency and the characteristics of its users in the ALSPAC cohort. Up until 2017 ALSPAC did not include questions regarding indoor tanning. The exceptions are the motherâs âYour environmentâ questionnaire administered in early gestation asking how often they had used a sun bed or lamp during their pregnancy, and the child-based KN questionnaire at 69 months old asking about ever use of sun bed or lamp and its frequency. On the other hand, ALSPAC children have been assessed with respect to natural sunlight exposure at regular intervals, although only up to the age of 12 years.
In one of the last waves of data collection for ALSPAC Young People (YP, Life@25+) we requested that a number of questions regarding indoor and outdoor tanning be included. This information is now available and we would like to investigate the determinants and the effects of tanning behaviour in the participants of ALSPAC at different life stages.
References
1. Wehner, M. R.; Shive, M. L.; Chren, M.-M.; Han, J.; Qureshi, A. A.; Linos, E. Indoor tanning and non-melanoma skin cancer: systematic review and meta-analysis. Br. Med. J. 2012, 345, 1â9, doi:10.1136/bmj.e5909.
2. El Ghissassi, F.; Baan, R.; Straif, K.; Grosse, Y.; Secretan, B.; Bouvard, V.; Benbrahim-Tallaa, L.; Guha, N.; Freeman, C.; Galichet, L.; Cogliano, V.; WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer Monograph Working Group A review of human carcinogens--part D: radiation. Lancet. Oncol. 2009, 10, 751â2.
3. Boniol, M.; Autier, P.; Boyle, P.; Gandini, S. Cutaneous melanoma attributable to sunbed use: systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ 2012, 345, e4757âe4757, doi:10.1136/bmj.e4757.