Life Study: pilot phase

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 wellbeing 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 will invite more than 100,000 pregnant women and their partners from across the UK to join our study. 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.

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 the parent.

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 and 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.

The public, policymakers, the health and other public services and the academic and research community will benefit from this research

For example, the public will benefit from this research as it will lead to better understanding abut early life influences on children's health, policy makers will benefit through contemporary insights into children and family lives and through research evaluating current or future policies. Novel measures of biomarkers at this age may lead to benefits for diagnostic tests and discovery science
By focusing on children from minority ethnic groups we will obtain insights into their lives and health and early growth and development. This is important as, for example, the current obesity epidemic operates differently by ethnic groups and an optimum growth pattern may not be generalisable across all ethnic groups. Benefit will arise from the novel methodological advances for academics and through the research resource developed

We will ensure that they have the opportunity to benefit from this research by stakeholder engagement from the beginning, by dissemination of findings through multiple public and scientific media including public engagement activities to promote the importance of the knowledge gained from Life Study, by working with CLOSER and generally ensuring the maximum translation of knowledge into public benefit through policy development. Benefits will also accrue through training opportunities and the interdisciplinary and international collaborations fostered.