The Bristol babies who are unlocking the secrets of life

Children Project 90 is celebrating its 21st anniversary and its unique database of information on how we live today

last Christmas, Dr. Sue received a text message ring unusual. A freezer was broken, they said. The news sent running -. Nobody home but the workplace, the home of children in the project in Bristol 90

In the basement, the ring, which is the project manager of laboratories began to draw blood blisters and affected tissue freezing, one of 60 held at the headquarters project. Then transferred to a refrigerator parts. More than 1.5 million biological samples from thousands of local children and parents in the last two decades, are maintained in these cold rooms. They are valuable resources, to say the least. Therefore, the automated message system that is activated when the temperature rises inside a freezer.

"I was messing around with a frozen turkey that day," said Ring. "Instead, I had to change the refrigerated samples of human blood and saliva. If I had not, tens of thousands of them were ruined. "

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quick action sets a strong commitment among the 40 full time and 60 part-time employees in the proposed Bristol. Officially called the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), children in the 90 celebrates 21 years. The first pregnancy in the Avon area were hired in April 1991 and continued to the mothers to be signed during the next 21 months until it has 13,761 on its books.

The lives of these women, and 13 988 were children, have since come to study in unprecedented detail, with almost all aspects of the lifestyle and all the bits of your DNA is recorded, stored and studied. The resulting mass of data has helped revolutionize the details of the health of the nation and is transforming our understanding of childhood, the education of children and adolescents - the impact of the education of children of lesbians in the sense of physical education in obesity levels and consequences of weight gain in early pregnancy to teenage attitudes to drugs and alcohol. Autism, self-injury, menopause, nutrition, allergies, sudden infant death syndrome and many other issues have also revealed their secrets through the use of data from Bristol.

Nor are these studies are limited to researchers based in the city. More than 650 university based centers around the world, now make use of these highly detailed, long-term studies of urban children and their mothers.

"Many researchers who use our data is based in the U.S.," said Lynn Molloy, executive director of the project. "The United States has no longitudinal studies of life people as detailed as that. If people want to learn the health, physical change and attitudes over time, go here. Britain is a world leader in this kind of thing. There is another reason to celebrate this month. "

is a save point by Professor Debbie Lawlor, co-director of the project. "Children of the 90 is just one of the most recent of the British emergency to gather data about themselves census data, church records, records of temperature, the number of trains: .. what is or we collect is in our blood. "

As in previous years, information increasingly accumulated in the vaults of the project and computers. Consequently, the annual output of scholarly work on the basis of children and mothers of Bristol has skyrocketed. Professor George Davey Smith, scientific director of the project, pointing at a row of files outside of the box office. "The first contains all the documents generated from data collected during project operations 1991/99," he said. "In 2011, much research is generated, producing a single year filled with a box of file. More than 700 scientific articles have been produced from our results and things busier. "

factual, from the beginning, the study has generated - and titles. Consider an example. When the project began, there was much debate about the effect of putting babies to sleep on their backs to reduce sudden death. Powerful evidence that has accumulated to indicate that it could reduce mortality. However, some scientists fear that putting babies on their backs would be to slow the engine development, the process by which the baby begins to explore the world, directing their gaze toward objects of interest, support your body against gravity, handling and tracking of objects on the ground. Turn left at the back in a crib, which could inhibit this process, it was argued.

"Fortunately, we had data to answer this," said Davey Smith. "Our results showed that there had been some slowing of motor development in children, but the effect disappears when the baby reaches 18 months of age. Babies placed on their backs to sleep were found with their peers."

The discovery was a major boost to the health service Back to Sleep campaign, which began in 1990 and is now credited with cutting the SIDS or sudden infant death of about one on 500 babies in its current figure of about one in 2000. Thus, the lives of more than 10 babies a week are recorded.

addition to this work, the children of 90 studies showed that peanut allergies are very common in the population, suggests that there is little evidence of social mobility across generations in the United Kingdom, and provides strong support to the idea that physical activity, when encouraged since childhood, has a real impact in the fight against obesity in the future.

Then there are results on medicinal snuff, alcohol and illegal. "We wanted to know if you can tell who is more likely in later life became a heavy drinker," said Davey Smith. "So we asked the youth of our study about their experiences and memories of taking his first drink. We found that those who require a lot of drinks to feel an effect from the first time I drank alcohol were more likely to happen to become heavy drinkers. "Interestingly, the opposite of cannabis. Other studies have shown that people who need a lot of it to feel an effect, when they start using drugs are more likely to stop use later in life. In essence, says, why should we have all these things when you have so little effect us

Those conducting studies as the tread on dangerous ground, however. They risk the wrath of those who do not believe that we should talk to youth about drugs or alcohol. Furthermore, these studies also risk annoying the project by asking questions to young perceived as intrusive or stupid. "We are constantly asked questions of our young cohort on smoking, drugs and alcohol," said Molloy. "But if we continue to distribute questionnaires unreliable or stupid, children feel they are wasting their time and begin to leave the studio."

To avoid this, the project has created a teen advisory group, composed of youth project, in fact, judging scientists who want to challenge themselves and other members of the cohort very personal questions. Make a series of silly questions and found their study will be vetoed, in short.

"Ultimately, the youth do not have to answer all I feel is shame, though his answers to questions about drugs and sex are completely anonymous," said Kate Sherlock, a senior project. It is one of the original mothers who enrolled in the project in 1991. His son, Thomas, now a student at Cheltenham, has been on the books during study past 21 years. "I've always been interested in the job, but now I am totally absorbed This is a place in the world where everyone is fully committed to one goal: the implementation of the project .."

Keep an area of ??study important is a tricky business. Over the past 21 years, the number of mothers and children have fallen so that there are only about 8,500 in each group. "People live busy lives today, and although participation does not take much effort or time, there will always be people who give up. You still have good numbers, but we will do nothing to jeopardize that, "said Sherlock.

• For data collection, which comes in a number of ways. No direct physical measurements taken during regular visits to the clinic, including the height of the child, the weight, measurement of bone mass and blood pressure. Then there are the psychological questionnaires and social, including topics such as attitudes towards drugs, snuff and alcohol. Then there are administrative data, including health and criminal records.
• Finally, there are biological samples. "We collect almost everything we can," said Ring. "We take blood for the life of a child, and samples of saliva, urine and hair. We have the DNA of 10,000 children and 10,000 mothers in our fridges. We have a lot of placentas. We even had some of his baby teeth, which were difficult to obtain. We had to negotiate for them. They are worth the money for children after all. Ultimately, we have baby teeth only when we gave every boy and girl an official form of ALSPAC, signed by the tooth fairy. "

Armed with this arsenal of weapons epidemiological, not surprising that children in the 90's became so popular among scientists and doctors. Their studies, using data from Bristol, have highlighted a number of interesting conclusions, which are essential to the health of the nation: that young children now have too much salt in their diet, that bottle-fed babies who start solid food early are more likely to become obese children, and nearly a third more babies suffered diarrhea in homes where air fresheners, including sticks, sprays and aerosols daily use compared to households having used more than once a week

In many recent cases, children of 90 data were used to answer the questions that were not even dreamed of when the project was created, a point emphasized by Lawlor. "Take a recent example, scientists have come to believe that mothers who earn too early in pregnancy may give birth to babies who grow up overweight to be larger than normal and are predisposed to heart disease in life adult. "

an interesting theory. However, research evidence in support proved to be complicated - until the children of the 90s intervened This review includes data on the cohort of mothers and their weight changes during pregnancy as well as details on their weight and health in children in recent years.
"We look back and remember the data and, yes, we found that children of mothers who were more weight in early pregnancy were more likely to be larger and have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, "they added. At age nine, children of these women were 2.2 pounds (1 kg) heavier, had more size for a little less than an inch, two pounds of body fat and more blood pressure slightly higher. "The thesis has even more work, of course," said Lawlor. "Mothers should be well fed during pregnancy and do not want to be afraid of food."

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