477 results match your criteria: "MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol.[Affiliation]"

Article Synopsis
  • Prenatal caffeine exposure has been suggested to affect offspring health through DNA methylation, but previous studies have lacked scale.
  • A meta-analysis of epigenome-wide studies from six European cohorts involving 3725 participants was conducted to assess the relationship between caffeine intake and DNA methylation in cord blood.
  • Two specific CpG sites were linked to caffeine and cola consumption, with 12-22 methylated regions identified; however, the overall evidence for caffeine's effect on fetal DNA methylation was weak, potentially due to limitations in statistical power.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Childhood socioeconomic position and sex-specific trajectories of metabolic traits across early life: prospective cohort study.

EBioMedicine

December 2023

School of Public Health, Western Gateway Building, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland; MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol, Oakfield House, Oakfield Grove, Bristol, BS82BN, UK; Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, Oakfield House, Oakfield Grove, Bristol, BS82BN, UK.

Background: Socioeconomic inequalities in cardiovascular disease risk begin early in life and are more pronounced in females than males later in life. Causal atherogenic traits explaining this are not well understood. We explored sex-specific associations between childhood socioeconomic position (SEP) and molecular measures of systemic metabolism across early life.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is the formation of a blood clot in a deep vein. DVT can lead to a venous thromboembolism (VTE), the combined term for DVT and pulmonary embolism, a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Despite the prevalence and associated morbidity of DVT, the underlying causes are not well understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Obesity may track across generations, due to genetics and shared family environmental factors, or possibly intrauterine programming. However, many studies only assess associations between maternal body mass index (BMI) and offspring BMI in childhood. To determine whether maternal and paternal associations with offspring BMI differ and whether associations persist into adulthood, a systematic review and meta-analysis was done.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the long-term effects of menarche timing on depressive symptoms in girls, focusing on whether early onset leads to increased depression in adulthood.
  • Results indicate that although early menarche is linked to higher depressive symptoms at age 14, this association diminishes by age 24, suggesting no persistent effect into adulthood.
  • Late menarche also correlates with lower depressive symptoms during adolescence but levels off by age 24, indicating that girls with later onset catch up to their peers in terms of depressive symptoms over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Depression and overweight both often emerge early in life and have been found to be associated, but few studies examine depression-overweight comorbidity and its social patterning early in the life course. Drawing on data from 4,948 participants of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) birth cohort from the UK (2,798 female, 2,150 male), we investigated how different aspects of early-life socioeconomic circumstances are associated with depression-overweight comorbidity from adolescence to young adulthood exploring any differences by age and sex. We estimated how parental education, social class and financial difficulties reported in pregnancy were associated with depression and overweight, and their comorbidity at approximately the ages 17 and 24 in males and females.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Human height is primarily determined by genetics, but this study explores how modifiable epigenetic factors, specifically blood DNA methylation, influence child height in low and middle-income countries (LMIC).
  • The research identifies a significant link between DNA methylation in the SOCS3 gene and child height, with findings replicating in a high-income country cohort, showing that this effect is independent of genetic factors.
  • Analysis reveals that SOCS3 methylation explains up to 9.5% of height variance in mid-childhood and is influenced by prenatal maternal folate and socio-economic status, highlighting the potential role of epigenetic modifications in child growth in LMIC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Placental syndromes and maternal cardiovascular health.

Clin Sci (Lond)

August 2023

School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Health, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.

The placental syndromes gestational hypertension, preeclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction are associated with an increased cardiovascular risk to the mother later in life. In this review, we argue that a woman's pre-conception cardiovascular health drives both the development of placental syndromes and long-term cardiovascular risk but acknowledge that placental syndromes can also contribute to future cardiovascular risk independent of pre-conception health. We describe how preclinical studies in models of preeclampsia inform our understanding of the links with later cardiovascular disease, and how current pre-pregnancy studies may explain relative contributions of both pre-conception factors and the occurrence of placental syndromes to long-term cardiovascular disease.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Third molar teeth (wisdom teeth) are a common cause of pain and infection in young adults. The study aimed to describe the prevalence of symptomatic third molar teeth and identify factors which predispose to third molar symptoms in a birth cohort.

Methods: An observational study was undertaken nested in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a birth cohort based in south west England.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * A study analyzed data from national birth registries in Nordic countries to compare CVD risks between individuals who gave birth after ART and those who did not, involving over 2.4 million participants.
  • * Results showed that people who had children through ART did not have a higher risk of developing CVD compared to those who conceived naturally, with various factors considered in the analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Multivariate genome-wide analysis of aging-related traits identifies novel loci and new drug targets for healthy aging.

Nat Aging

August 2023

Section on Clinical Genomics and Experimental Therapeutics, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.

The concept of aging is complex, including many related phenotypes such as healthspan, lifespan, extreme longevity, frailty and epigenetic aging, suggesting shared biological underpinnings; however, aging-related endpoints have been primarily assessed individually. Using data from these traits and multivariate genome-wide association study methods, we modeled their underlying genetic factor ('mvAge'). mvAge (effective n = ~1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To use genome-wide association study (GWAS) by subtraction, a method for deriving novel GWASs from existing summary statistics, to derive genome-wide summary statistics for paternal smoking.

Result: A GWAS by subtraction was implemented using a weighted linear model that defined the child-genotype paternal-phenotype association as the child-genotype child-phenotype association minus the child-genotype maternal-phenotype association. We first use the laws of inherence to derive the weighted linear model.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Understanding the genetic complexity of puberty timing across the allele frequency spectrum.

medRxiv

June 2023

MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, Box 285 Institute of Metabolic Science, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridge CB2 0QQ, UK.

Pubertal timing varies considerably and has been associated with a range of health outcomes in later life. To elucidate the underlying biological mechanisms, we performed multi-ancestry genetic analyses in ~800,000 women, identifying 1,080 independent signals associated with age at menarche. Collectively these loci explained 11% of the trait variance in an independent sample, with women at the top and bottom 1% of polygenic risk exhibiting a ~11 and ~14-fold higher risk of delayed and precocious pubertal development, respectively.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Irritability is a core symptom of adolescent depression, characterized by an increased proneness to anger or frustration. Irritability in youth is associated with future mental health problems and impaired social functioning, suggesting that it may be an early indicator of emotion regulation difficulties. Adolescence is a period during which behavior is significantly impacted by one's environment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Inflammation is associated with depression, but causality remains unclear. We investigated potential causality and direction of effect between inflammation and depression.

Methods: Using data from the ALSPAC birth cohort (n = 4021; 42.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (H, U, J, T, K, V, W, I, and X) were studied for their relationship with cardiometabolic risk factors in a cohort from birth to age 18, focusing on sex differences.
  • Data from 7,954 participants revealed that most haplogroups showed no significant association with cardiometabolic factors, except for slight variations observed in haplogroups V and X in females and haplogroup I in males during specific age points.
  • Overall, the findings suggest minimal evidence supporting a link between mitochondrial DNA haplogroups and cardiometabolic risk factors, indicating that other factors may play a more significant role in risk development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to model the growth patterns of children from pregnancy through the first five years using complex statistical models called linear spline multilevel models.
  • Conducted in a maternity hospital in Dublin, it involved 720-759 mother-child pairs from the ROLO study, which originally focused on the effects of a low glycaemic index diet in preventing large birth weights.
  • The findings revealed that growth rates were highest during pregnancy and immediately after birth, with a gradual slowdown in growth as children matured, demonstrating the effectiveness of the chosen modeling approach for tracking growth over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The associations between height, socioeconomic position (SEP) and coronary heart disease (CHD) incidence are well established, but the contribution of genetic factors to these associations is still poorly understood. We used a polygenic score (PGS) for height to shed light on these associations.

Methods: Finnish population-based health surveys in 1992-2011 (response rates 65-93%) were linked to population registers providing information on SEP and CHD incidence up to 2019.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Recognizing the early signs of cancer risk is vital for informing prevention, early detection, and survival.

Methods: To investigate whether changes in circulating metabolites characterise the early stages of colorectal cancer (CRC) development, we examined associations between a genetic risk score (GRS) associated with CRC liability (72 single nucleotide polymorphisms) and 231 circulating metabolites measured by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N=6,221). Linear regression models were applied to examine associations between genetic liability to colorectal cancer and circulating metabolites measured in the same individuals at age 8, 16, 18 and 25 years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The changes which typically occur in molecular causal risk factors and predictive biomarkers for cardiometabolic diseases across early life are not well characterised.

Methods: We quantified sex-specific trajectories of 148 metabolic trait concentrations including various lipoprotein subclasses from age 7 years to 25 years. Data were from 7065 to 7626 offspring (11 702 to14 797 repeated measures) of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children birth cohort study.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Small intestinal neuroendocrine tumours (siNETs) are rare neoplasms which present with low mutational burden and can be subtyped based on copy number variation (CNV). Currently, siNETs can be molecularly classified as having chromosome 18 loss of heterozygosity (18LOH), multiple CNVs (MultiCNV), or no CNVs. 18LOH tumours have better progression-free survival when compared to MultiCNV and NoCNV tumours, however, the mechanism underlying this is unknown, and clinical practice does not currently consider CNV status.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Earlier pubertal timing in adolescents is linked to higher rates of depressive symptoms during later adolescence, particularly in females.
  • The study analyzed data from approximately 5,000 adolescents aged 9-13 to explore the connections between puberty, brain structure, and depression over three years.
  • Results indicated that earlier puberty contributed to increased depressive symptoms two years later, with brain structure potentially playing a mediating role in this relationship, even after accounting for factors like parental depression and family income.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Antenatal corticosteroids (ACS) are commonly used to improve outcomes for preterm births, but there are significant gaps in knowledge regarding their safety, long-term effects, and appropriate timing and dosage.
  • The Consortium for the Study of Pregnancy Treatments (Co-OPT) was established to investigate the safety of medications during pregnancy, creating an extensive international birth cohort to analyze ACS exposure and its effects on pregnancy and neonatal outcomes.
  • The Co-OPT ACS cohort includes data on 2.28 million pregnancies from multiple countries, providing valuable information on ACS exposure rates and a follow-up for various health outcomes in children, aiming to address concerns about overtreatment and the efficacy of ACS usage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF