The eLIXIR (early LIFe data Cross-Linkage in Research) Cohort.

健康的基础在生命的最早阶段就建立起来了。如果发育中的胚胎、胎儿、新生儿和幼儿在生命中有一个尽可能好的开端，这将保护他们成年后免受健康不良的影响。为了实现这些最好的开始，我们必须了解在早期生活的每个关键阶段都会出现什么问题。有些原因比其他原因更明显；例如，早产会导致呼吸问题，但还有许多其他因素可以以复杂的方式相互作用，影响孩子一生的身心健康。如果我们知道这些因素是什么，我们就可以努力预防它们或它们的有害影响。长生不老药研究旨在建立一种新的方法，利用母亲和婴儿健康记录中的常规信息，来揭示有害的早期生活影响的复杂性。虽然少数人选择不提供他们的记录，但绝大多数人支持我们的战略。它的优势是将几乎每个人都纳入我们的产妇群体，因此所有种族和社会群体都有代表。我们已经证明，我们可以将全科医生和医院的母亲和婴儿的心理和身体健康记录联系起来，现在我们准备邀请英国各地的研究人员使用我们的数据，探索影响儿童健康的早期生活影响，并找到成年后预防疾病的方法。灵丹妙药始于2018年，我们已经有了超过4万名孕妇和她们的孩子的数据，我们将继续收集母亲的数据，直到我们有10万名怀孕的数据；这将需要大约4年的时间。这项对母亲和婴儿的大规模研究为研究人员提供了采取新方法从数据中学习的机会，所有这些都在一个电子的、可信的研究空间内，随时保护母亲和婴儿的身份。提供我们数据的人生活在伦敦东南部，那里的心理和身体健康问题很常见。这些母亲来自许多不同的民族，往往在社会和经济上处于贫困状态。因此，通过在这个社区工作，Elixir专注于那些最需要帮助的人，它的发现应该与英国其他弱势社区相关。事实上，我们将通过与威尔士、苏格兰和英格兰东北部的其他团体合作来测试这一点，这些团体也在使用常规的健康数据来研究母亲和她们的婴儿，以及孩子未来的健康。这项研究的另一个重要元素是血液样本的收集。我们并不是从所有母亲和婴儿那里获得这些服务--只有那些在怀孕早期来到诊所时允许这样做的人才会这样做。我们已经有了1400多名参与者的样本，他们的特征与我们的母亲群体相似。这种血液样本的储存很重要，因为可以对它们进行许多不同类型的测量，以增加我们从全科医生和医院健康记录中获得的信息。我们的计划将通过被认可为MRC‘纵向人口研究’来实现。这将为我们的长生不老药基础设施提供资金支持，主要是为从不同来源收集母亲和婴儿的信息、在可信、安全的空间将这些信息联系在一起或收集样本的工作人员提供资金。在未来，我们计划让灵丹妙药变得自给自足，因为来自英国各地的研究人员可以获得信息和样本，并为这些成本做出贡献。

The foundations of health are established at the very earliest stages of life. If the developing embryo, fetus, newborn baby and young child are given the best possible start in life, this will provide protection against poor health when they are adults. To achieve these best beginnings, we have to understand what can go wrong at each of those key stages in early life. Some causes are more obvious than others; for example, being born prematurely can lead to breathing problems, but there are many other factors that can interact in a complex way to affect the child's mental and physical health for life. If we know what these factors are, we can work to prevent them or their harmful effects.The eLIXIR study aims to establish a novel way of unravelling the complexity of harmful early life influences, using routine information from mothers' and babies' health records. Whilst a few people choose to opt-out of providing their records, the vast majority support our strategy. It has the advantage of including almost everyone in our maternity population, so that all ethnic and social groups are represented.Having shown that we can link together mothers and babies' mental and physical health records from GP practices and hospitals, we are now ready to invite researchers from around the UK to use our data, and explore the early life influences that affect children's health and find ways of preventing disease in adulthood. eLIXIR started in 2018, and we already have data from more than 40,000 pregnant women and their children, and we will continue collecting mums' data until we have data from 100,000 pregnancies; this will take about 4 years. This very large study of mums and babies gives researchers the opportunity to undertake novel approaches to learning from the data, all within an electronic, trusted research space that protects the identify of the mums and babies at all times.The people providing our data live in South East London, where mental and physical health problems are common. The mothers come from many different ethnic groups and are often socially and economically deprived. Therefore, by working in this community, eLIXIR concentrates on those who most need help, and its findings should be relevant to other disadvantaged communities across the UK. Indeed, we will test this out by working with other groups, in Wales, Scotland and North East England, who are also using routine health data to study mothers and their babies, and the future health of the children.Another important element of the study is the collection of blood samples. We do not obtain these from all mothers and babies - just those who give permission to do so when they come to clinics in early pregnancy. We already have samples from more than 1400 participants who are similar in their characteristics to our population of mums. This store of blood samples is important, because there are many different kinds of measurements that can be done on them, to add to the information that we have from the GP and hospital health records. Our plans will be realised by recognition as an MRC 'Longitudinal Population Study'. This would provide us with funding support for the eLIXIR infrastructure, primarily to fund staff who collect mums' and babies' information from different sources, link that information together in the trusted, safe space, or collect the samples. In the future, we plan for eLIXIR to become self-sufficient, as researchers from all over the UK access the information and samples, and contribute to these costs.