A Pilot Study Of Internet Recruitment and follow-up among Reproductive Age Women

描述（由申请人提供）：互联网可以改变流行病学的实践，因为它能够与广泛地理区域的大量人员进行交流，与旧的交流方式相比，它的成本大大降低，并且与研究参与者保持联系很方便。尽管有这样的前景，但迄今为止，很少有研究评估利用互联网进行前瞻性队列研究的有效性和有效性。我们建议进行一项试点研究，以评估使用互联网延迟生育的风险因素。这项探索性研究将在丹麦进行，丹麦是世界上互联网使用率最高的国家之一，并保留了关于各种健康风险和结果的广泛登记数据，这些数据可以使用每个丹麦公民出生时分配的国民身份号码进行链接。该研究将评估使用互联网进行招聘和数据收集的可行性和有效性。其次，它将评估几个潜在的风险因素，包括咖啡因，吸烟和药物使用，与延迟受孕时间有关。此外，通过与包含妊娠结局信息的登记处联系，我们将评估几种与流产和其他分娩结局风险相关的孕前和妊娠早期暴露。这项研究是独一无二的，因为大多数关于生育能力的研究都是对怀孕妇女的受孕时间进行回顾性评估，这种方法可能会导致选择和回忆偏差。互联网将使我们能够识别正在考虑怀孕的妇女，这是一个使用传统流行病学方法难以定位的人群。通过有针对性的互联网广告，我们将招募5000名年龄在18-40岁之间的女性，她们在过去一个月内停止了避孕措施，或者计划在未来六个月内尝试怀孕。在验证参与者的身份和参与为期一年的研究的意愿后，参与者将每两个月接受一次基于网络的问卷调查，直到怀孕，或者长达一年。提出的基于互联网的方法是新颖的，但在很大程度上未经观察流行病学背景的检验。这样的设计可能会对流行病学的实践产生广泛的影响。如果成功，我们设想这项研究将成为第一个更详细的研究，利用互联网招募队列成员进行长期随访研究。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The internet could transform the practice of epidemiology, with its ability to communicate with large numbers of people over broad geographic areas, its dramatically lower costs compared with older forms of communication, and its convenience for maintaining contact with study participants. Despite this promise, thus far little research has been conducted to evaluate the efficacy and validity of conducting prospective cohort studies using the internet for recruitment and follow-up. We propose to conduct a pilot study to evaluate risk factors for delayed fecundability using the internet. This exploratory study will be conducted in Denmark, which has one of the highest prevalences of internet usage in the world, and maintains extensive registry data on a variety of health exposures and outcomes that are linkable using a national identity number assigned to every Danish citizen at birth. The study will assess the feasibility and validity of using the internet for recruitment and data collection. Secondarily, it will evaluate several potential risk factors, including caffeine, smoking and medication use, in relation to delayed time to conception. In addition, by linking with registries that contain information on pregnancy outcomes, we will evaluate several pre- conception and early pregnancy exposures in relation to risk of miscarriage and other birth outcomes. The proposed study is unique because most studies of fecundability have evaluated the time to conception retrospectively among women who become pregnant, a method that may result in selection and recall bias. The internet will allow us to identify women who are contemplating a pregnancy, a challenging population to target using traditional epidemiologic methods. Using targeted internet advertisements, we will recruit a cohort of 5,000 women age 18-40 who have discontinued birth control within the past month, or who plan to attempt a pregnancy within the next six months. After a short run-in period to verify a participant's identity and willingness to participate in a year-long study, participants will be followed using web-based questionnaires every two months, until conception occurs, or for as long as one year. The proposed internet- based methodology is novel but largely untested in observational epidemiologic settings. Such a design could have far-ranging implications for the practice of epidemiology in general. If successful, we envision this study to be the first of more elaborate studies that employ the internet to enroll cohort members into long-term follow-up studies.