Journal article
Cohort profile: Finnish health and early life microbiota (HELMi) longitudinal birth cohort
- Abstract:
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PURPOSE:
HELMi (Health and Early Life Microbiota) is a longitudinal, prospective general population birth cohort, set up to identify environmental, lifestyle and genetic factors that modify the intestinal microbiota development in the first years of life and their relation to child health and well-being.
PARTICIPANTS:
The HELMi cohort consists of 1055 healthy term infants born in 2016-2018 mainly at the capital region of Finland and their parents. The intestinal microbiota development of the infants is characterised based on nine, strategically selected, faecal samples and connected to extensive online questionnaire-collected metadata at weekly to monthly intervals focusing on the diet, other exposures and family's lifestyle as well as the health and growth of the child. Motor and cognitive developmental screening takes place at 18 months. Infant's DNA sample, mother's breast milk sample and both parent's spot faecal samples have been collected.
FINDINGS TO DATE:
The mean age of the mothers was 32.8 (SD 4.1) and fathers/coparents 34.8 (5.3) years at the time of enrolment. Seventeen percentage (n=180) of the infants were born by caesarean section. Just under half (49%) were firstborns; 50.7% were males. At 3 months of age, 86% of the babies were exclusively breastfed and 2% exclusively formula-fed.
FUTURE PLANS:
The current follow-up from pregnancy to first 24 months will be completed in March 2020, totalling to over 10 000 biological samples and over 50 000 questionnaire entries. The results are expected to identify environmental and host factors that affect early gut microbiota development and health, and hence give indications of how to prevent or reverse microbiota perturbations in infancy. This prospective cohort will be followed up further to identify how the early microbiota relates to later health outcomes, especially weight gain, infections and allergic and other chronic diseases.
TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT03996304; Pre-results.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-028500
Authors
- Publisher:
- BMJ Publishing Group
- Journal:
- BMJ Open More from this journal
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 6
- Pages:
- e028500-
- Place of publication:
- England
- Publication date:
- 2019-06-27
- Acceptance date:
- 2019-05-24
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2044-6055
- ISSN:
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2044-6055
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1160636
- Local pid:
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pubs:1160636
- Deposit date:
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2021-02-10
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Korpela et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Rights statement:
- ©2019 Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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