Abstract
Environmental exposures during pregnancy and early life may have adverse health effects. Single birth cohort studies often lack statistical power to tease out such effects reliably. To improve the use of existing data and to facilitate collaboration among these studies, an inventory of the environmental exposure and health data in these studies was made as part of the ENRIECO (Environmental Health Risks in European Birth Cohorts) project. The focus with regard to exposure was on outdoor air pollution, water contamination, allergens and biological organisms, metals, pesticides, smoking and second hand tobacco smoke (SHS), persistent organic pollutants (POPs), noise, radiation, and occupational exposures. The review lists methods and data on environmental exposures in 37 European birth cohort studies. Most data is currently available for smoking and SHS (N=37 cohorts), occupational exposures (N=33), outdoor air pollution, and allergens and microbial agents (N=27). Exposure modeling is increasingly used for long-term air pollution exposure assessment; biomonitoring is used for assessment of exposure to metals, POPs and other chemicals; and environmental monitoring for house dust mite exposure assessment. Collaborative analyses with data from several birth cohorts have already been performed successfully for outdoor air pollution, water contamination, allergens, biological contaminants, molds, POPs and SHS. Key success factors for collaborative analyses are common definitions of main exposure and health variables. Our review emphasizes that such common definitions need ideally be arrived at in the study design phase. However, careful comparison of methods used in existing studies also offers excellent opportunities for collaborative analyses. Investigators can use this review to evaluate the potential for future collaborative analyses with respect to data availability and methods used in the different cohorts and to identify potential partners for a specific research question.
Highlights
Pregnancy and birth cohort studies provide the possibility of repeated measurements of health outcomes and exposures at different time points from pregnancy through childhood and adolescence into adulthood
We focus on methodological issues such as comparability, validity, agreement between methods, ability to predict concentrations in earlier or later periods, and timing of exposure assessment that are relevant to several exposures rather than exposure-specific issues
Exposure assessment methods currently used in European birth cohorts A description of the basic characteristics of the cohorts has been presented elsewhere [5]
Summary
Pregnancy and birth cohort studies provide the possibility of repeated measurements of health outcomes and exposures at different time points from pregnancy through childhood and adolescence into adulthood. They present an ideal framework for the prospective study of the effects of environmental exposures on the health and development of children. There is an urgent need to evaluate, and where possible combine, the existing data, methods and tools from European birth cohort studies in order to evaluate possible links between environmental exposures and health [1]
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