title: Approaches for drawing causal inferences from epidemiological birth cohorts: a review.
abstract: Large-scale population-based birth cohorts, which recruit women during pregnancy or at birth and follow up their offspring through infancy and into childhood and adolescence, provide the opportunity to monitor and model early life exposures in relation to developmental characteristics and later life outcomes. However, due to confounding and other limitations, identification of causal risk factors has proved challenging and published findings are often not reproducible. A suite of methods has been developed in recent years to minimise problems afflicting observational epidemiology, to strengthen causal inference and to provide greater insights into modifiable intra-uterine and early life risk factors. The aim of this review is to describe these causal inference methods and to suggest how they may be applied in the context of birth cohorts and extended along with the development of birth cohort consortia and expansion of "omic" technologies.
authors.affiliation: Integrative Epidemiology Unit, School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. Electronic address: rebecca.richmond@bristol.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Rebecca C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Richmond
authors.affiliation: University of Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. Electronic address: aleefalamin@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Aleef
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Al-Amin
authors.affiliation: Integrative Epidemiology Unit, School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. Electronic address: kz.davey-smith@bristol.ac.uk.
authors.forename: George Davey
authors.initials: GD
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Integrative Epidemiology Unit, School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK; Institute of Genetic Medicine, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Electronic address: caroline.relton@bristol.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Caroline L
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Relton
mesh_terms: D001723:Birth Rate; D015984:Causality; D015331:Cohort Studies; D057890:Epigenomics / Q000379:methods; D055432:Metabolomics / Q000379:methods; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
keywords: Birth cohort; Causal inference; Consortia; DOHaD; Epidemiology; Epigenetics; Life course; Metabolomics; Omics