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

虽然人们普遍认为，女性在怀孕期间的生活方式和经历会影响孩子的发育和健康，但很少有强有力的科学研究支持这种联系。这种有限的证据基础意味着，目前给予孕妇的许多公共卫生建议是不一致的，令人困惑的，甚至可能有害。此外，越来越多的证据表明，男性的行为会影响未出生孩子的健康，但目前向准爸爸们提供的公共卫生建议很少，科学证据更少。这项工作的目的是更好地了解产前期间母亲和父亲的生活方式如何影响后代的健康和社会结果。研究结果将突出表明，改善儿童健康的干预措施最好是针对母亲、父亲还是父母双方。该项目利用了已经从英国、荷兰、挪威和丹麦的几项大型出生队列研究中收集到的详细和多样化的数据；允许访问数十万人的丰富数据。利用这些数据，我将确定母亲和/或父亲在产前吸烟、饮酒、脂肪/糖摄入量、咖啡因和体育活动是否与一系列儿童结局相关，包括出生体重、唇腭裂、体重指数、智商和教育程度。然后，我将应用几种最先进的统计方法来推断这些父母的健康行为是否实际上导致了这些后代的结果，或者观察到的相关性是否由于其他“混杂”因素（例如社会经济地位）而产生。当关系看起来是因果关系时，我将使用几种统计方法来推断结果是由母亲的行为、父亲的行为还是两者的结合引起的。最后，我将通过研究儿童血液中DNA甲基化水平（表观遗传学）、基因表达和代谢物来探索这些因果关系的生物学基础。这项工作的发现可能有助于改善儿童健康，因为它提供了更好的证据，说明母亲和父亲的生活方式如何影响儿童健康，以及针对母亲、父亲或父母双方的公共卫生建议是否最有效。

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.