Lunch Seminar-Constructing super-sized birth and child cohorts to gain new insights into the causes of child and adult diseases

The lecture draws attention to the two large global cohort collaborations Professor Dwyer currently leads. The first follows around 40,000 subjects who were first measured at school age, now moving into their 4th and 5th decades, to estimate separate effects of childhood physical and lifestyle characteristics on risk of major adult diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The second is the International Childhood Cancer Cohort Consortium (14C), a collaboration of birth cohorts in more than ten countries. It aims to obtain prospective evidence on the causes of childhood cancer by assembling data on 1 million mothers and babies who will be followed through childhood.