The Genomics of Birth Parameters and Cardiometabolic Disease: Reviving the Walker Birth Cohort

The relationship between early life growth and nutrition and the susceptibility to disease in later life has been studied since the late 70's. 40 years later, this relationship has become evident due to the mounting epidemiological evidence linking low birth weight, infant growth, and maternal weight and nutrition to risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases. Multiple studies have been performed over different populations, many under the Early Growth Genetics Consortium, and genes linking birth size and adverse cardiometabolic outcomes have been identified. However, there is a source of data that has recently been made available and is ripe for analysis: The Walker Birth Cohort. This is a longitudinal study of 48.000 children (75% of all births between 1952 and 1966) and their families from Dundee, Scotland. These babies are now aged 53 to 67 years old, with their parents ranging from 70 to 100 years old. Cardiovascular problems, metabolic diseases and cancer are highly prevalent at these ages. In addition, most of these people can be linked to a large number of current health databases, including genomic resources such as GoDARTS, GoSHARE and the Scottish Family Health Study (SFHS). Around 2500 Walker babies and parents have been genotyped, which allows genome wide association studies (GWAS) to link the neonatal birth records to current time health outcomes. The Walker Birth Cohort is very suitable dataset to continue investigating the relationship between early life parameters and susceptibility to cardiometabolic disease, due to its broadness and duration, the availability of parent data, and its linkage to multiple medical records.
The main aims of this PhD project are to:
1) Produce a clean dataset in the Dundee HIC safe haven, linking the Walker cohort to other health datasets in Tayside such as the cancer registry, the death registry, drug prescription data, cardiovascular health datasets, in addition to genetic data from GoDARTS, GoSHARE and SFHS.
2) Investigate the association of placental and birth weight with adverse cardiometabolic outcomes, such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.
3) Investigate the association of genetic risks for these cardiometabolic diseases with placental and birth weight, and produce a framework for birth weight genetic risk score on adverse health outcomes.