Life Study: Phase 1

A birth cohort study follows the same babies throughout their lives to understand more about how a child's very early social, emotional and physical development and their family and wider environment influences their future development, health and well-being as well as their risk of future ill health. These special types of studies give insights into what is called the life course starting in early life - they are a unique and special way to find out how early life experiences matter for later childhood and adult life. Our study will help identify what aspects of the environment in its broadest sense protect children and maximise their life chances and the ways in which that protection operates. It will also help us understand what aspects may increase vulnerability. We wish to understand the interplay between environmental and biological influences in early life recognising that this needs understanding of parents' lives and the wider family and society too. We plan to invite around 80,000 pregnant women and their partners from across the UK to join our study, around 60,000 in pregnancy and 20,000 after the birth of their baby. We want to include women and their partners from all walks of life. We will work to maximise recruitment of people from different ethnic groups. In pregnancy both parents will be interviewed, weighed and measured and asked to take part in some simple computer based tests. Parents will be asked to bring their baby to be seen at 6 and 12 months of age for some body size measurements and eye and child development tests. There will be no blood tests for the baby. In the first phase of Life Study we will work with two maternity units to offer mothers and their partners an opportunity to take part, aiming to recruit around 16,000 mothers in pregnancy and we will also recruit about 10,000 mothers in the early months after the birth of their baby. Our experience in this first phase will help us refine the second phase when we plan to recruit the remaining 54,000 mothers (44,000 in pregnancy and 10,000 after birth). We hope to follow all the children and their families throughout childhood and adult life so that we can see how they grow and develop and how their family circumstances change. We will do that in a number of ways including by getting consent at the beginning of the study to link to future routine health and other records of the baby and parents/care-givers. Scientists and others learn a lot from these large studies about how we can help children get a good start in life and improve their life chances and future well being and happiness. The information collected will be anonymised so that the privacy of families can be protected and will be made available to researchers to analyse to make sure we get the most benefit from it. We will be able to compare the Life Study generation with information collected from earlier generations in similar special British cohort studies. We will make sure that families taking part are informed about the progress of the study and any early findings and will ensure that other scientists, in the UK and abroad, policymakers and all members of the public also get to hear about Life Study findings. We have been working with members of the public from a wide range of backgrounds to help us plan the Study and ensure that it can answer questions that parents think are important.