Prenatal influences on childhood health: what role for mums and dads?

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While it is widely recognised that a woman's lifestyle and experiences during pregnancy can influence the development and health of her child, remarkably little robust, scientific research supports this link. This limited evidence-base means that much of the current public health advice given to pregnant women is inconsistent, confusing and may potentially even be harmful. Additionally, there is emerging evidence that a man's behaviour can influence the health of their unborn children, but very little public health advice is currently offered to fathers-to-be, and the scientific evidence is even more scant.This work aims to better understand how both maternal and paternal lifestyles in the prenatal period influence offspring health and social outcomes. Findings will highlight whether interventions to improve child health are best targeted at mothers, fathers or both parents.The project makes use of detailed and diverse data that has already been collected through several large birth cohort studies from the UK, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark; allowing access to rich data on hundreds of thousands of people. Using these data, I will identify whether maternal and/or paternal smoking, alcohol intake, fat/sugar intake, caffeine and physical activity in the prenatal period are correlated with a range of childhood outcomes including birth weight, cleft lip/palate, body mass index, IQ and educational attainment. I will then apply several state-of-the-art statistical methods to infer whether these parental health behaviours actually cause these offspring outcomes, or whether the observed correlations arise because of other "confounding" factors (e.g. socioeconomic position). Where it looks like the relationship is causal, I will use several statistical methods to infer whether the outcome is caused by maternal behaviour, paternal behaviour, or a combination of the two. Finally, I will explore the biological basis to these causal relationships by studying blood levels of DNA methylation (epigenetics), gene expression and metabolites in the children.Findings from this work could help improve childhood health by providing better evidence about how the lifestyles of mothers and fathers shape childhood health and whether public health advice would be most effective if aimed at mothers, fathers or both parents.