Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LIFECYCLE (Early-life stressors and LifeCycle health)

Teaser

Early life is an important window of opportunity to improve health across the full lifecycle. Exposure to stressors just before or during pregnancy or during early childhood leads to developmental adaptations, which subsequently affect life course and disease risk. Optimising...

Summary

Early life is an important window of opportunity to improve health across the full lifecycle. Exposure to stressors just before or during pregnancy or during early childhood leads to developmental adaptations, which subsequently affect life course and disease risk. Optimising early-life conditions has the yet unfulfilled potential to improve life course health trajectories for individuals themselves and also their offspring through transgenerational effects. Therefore, novel strategies for optimising early life will help to maximize the human developmental potential for current and future European generations. Prospective cohort studies starting from pregnancy or childhood provide the opportunity to study the effects of early-life stressors in relation to lifecycle health trajectories, and their potential for targeted prevention or intervention strategies. Europe has a strong tradition in population-based prospective cohort studies from pregnancy or childhood onwards. These cohorts are invaluable resources to identify a wide range of early-life stressors in connection with individual biological, developmental and health trajectory variations related to the onset and evolution of non-communicable diseases.

The LifeCycle Project (www.lifecycle-project.eu) is designed to establish the EU Child Cohort Network, which brings together existing, successful pregnancy and child cohorts and biobanks, by developing a governance structure taking account of national and European ethical, legal and societal implications, a shared data-management platform and data-harmonisation strategies. LifeCycle enriches this EU Child Cohort Network by generating new integrated data on early life stressors related to socio-economic, migration, urban environment and life-style determinants, and capitalise on these data by performing hypothesis-driven research on early life stressors influencing cardio-metabolic, respiratory and mental health trajectories during the full lifecycle, and the underlying epigenetic mechanisms. LifeCycle translates these results into recommendations for targeted strategies and personalised prediction models to improve health trajectories for current and future Europeans generations by optimising their earliest phase of life. To strengthen this long-term collaboration, LifeCycle organises yearly international meetings open to pregnancy and child cohort researchers, introduces a Fellowship Training Programme for exchange of junior researchers between European pregnancy or child cohorts, and develops e-learning modules for researchers performing life course health studies. Ultimately, LifeCycle will lead to a unique sustainable EU Child Cohort Network, and provide recommendations for targeted prevention strategies by identification of novel markers of early life stressors related to health trajectories throughout the lifecycle.

Work performed

LifeCycle started January 1st 2017, and the overall progress is according to the schedule.

LifeCycle first phase is strongly focused on establishing the EU Child Cohort Network. The partners have completed birth cohort data inventories and are working on the data harmonisation between the cohorts. The first phase of this work is expected to be finished in year 2020. Also, the data sharing platform (DataSHIELD) has been introduced to all partners. Several workshops on working with the servers, data handling and performing federated analyses were organised linked to the LifeCycle General Assembly meetings. The first version of the data management and governance plan is available. The work on constructing integrated exposure indices for early-life stressors, including the overall integrated exposome measure has been started.

LifeCycle is mainly focused on the effects of early life stressors on lifecycle health. Main outcomes include cardio-metabolic, respiratory and mental health outcomes. This research will use data brought together in the EU Child Cohort Network. The work started with data inventory and harmonisation of the main cardio-metabolic, respiratory and mental health outcomes. LifeCycle partners started and published several research projects linked to other networks and collaborations or using cohort specific data. This work is extremely important, because it uses collaboration approaches and statistical models which will also be used in LifeCycle.

LifeCycle organised workshops on advanced methodological approaches in observational studies and on epigenetics. These workshops were linked to the 10th World Congress on Developmental Origins of Health and Disease in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were open for all researchers and were fully booked, with 100 participants each.

LifeCycle partners started with preparing a strategy for reviewing evidence for interventions on early-life stressors. The review work is scheduled for the upcoming reporting period (WP9). To increase the potential impact of future LifeCycle research findings, plans for working with stakeholders, approaching policy makers and other dissemination strategies have been discussed at the General Assembly meetings. A logo, website, letterheads and flyer have been developed. The LifeCycle Fellowship Programme granted four fellowships for exchange between partners.

LifeCycle management was performed according to the plan. In total, three General Assembly meetings and nine Executive Board Meetings were organised. Where possible, we try to link the General Assembly meetings to other relevant meetings.

Final results

LIFECYCLE has the following key expected results:

The EU Child Cohort Network brings together data of more than 250,000 European children and their parents and enables optimal exploitation of available research and biobank data. This network will enable long-term exploitation of the enormous potential of European pregnancy and child cohort studies, and within this project, use these cohorts to generate novel findings and translate these into practical applications for use by healthcare professionals and European citizens.

Novel markers for integrated adverse early-life stressors and the early-life exposome, which will be derived from European pregnancy and child cohort studies participating in the EU Child Cohort Network. These integrated data will be harmonized between European pregnancy and child cohorts and enable comparison studies between European populations and countries and etiological research.

Personalized prediction models to predict the onset and evolution of risk factors for cardio-metabolic, respiratory and mental outcomes throughout the life course from individual pregnancy and infancy early-life stressor data, taking account for baseline risk estimation from socio-economic, migration and urban environmental stressors.

Mobile eHealth applications for individually customised counselling for pregnant women and young children based on personalised prediction models.

Tutorials and e-learning modules for researchers focused on “Early-life programming of non-communicable diseases”. LifeCycle will develop e-learning modules conceptualised for training of healthcare professionals and investigators. E-learning modules will provide effective dissemination by digital information sharing with a broad global outreach.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.lifecycle-project.eu.