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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Caroline Relton
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Large-scale population-based birth cohorts, which recruit women during pregnancy or at birth and follow up their offspring through infancy and into childhood and adolescence, provide the opportunity to monitor and model early life exposures in relation to developmental characteristics and later life outcomes. However, due to confounding and other limitations, identification of causal risk factors has proved challenging and published findings are often not reproducible. A suite of methods has been developed in recent years to minimise problems afflicting observational epidemiology, to strengthen causal inference and to provide greater insights into modifiable intra-uterine and early life risk factors. The aim of this review is to describe these causal inference methods and to suggest how they may be applied in the context of birth cohorts and extended along with the development of birth cohort consortia and expansion of "omic" technologies. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
Author(s): Richmond RC, Al-Amin A, Smith GD, Relton CL
Publication type: Review
Publication status: Published
Journal: Early Human Development
Year: 2014
Volume: 90
Issue: 11
Pages: 769-780
Print publication date: 01/11/2014
Online publication date: 22/09/2014
ISSN (print): 0378-3782
ISSN (electronic): 1872-6232
Publisher: ELSEVIER IRELAND LTD
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2014.08.023
DOI: 10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2014.08.023