Family matters

Designing, analysing and understanding family based studies in life course epidemiology

Edited by Deborah A. Lawlor and Gita D. Mishra

A Life Course Approach to Adult Health

Fourth book in the extremely successful Life Course Approach to Adult Health series
Details underlying assumptions of family-based studies, to assist the reader in interpreting their findings
Describes how doing studies within families can help us to understand whether a risk factor is causal or not, without having to do experiments with humans
Describes the practicalities of doing these family-based studies, some of the pitfalls, and how to avoid them
Describes practical difficulties of establishing and running a birth cohort in both high-income and low-middle income countries, and ways to minimise them
Provides statistical formulae and programming syntax
Contains examples of uses of family-based studies, including how they have helped understanding of the causes of disease, which also assists in understanding the limitations of such studies

Family matters

Designing, analysing and understanding family based studies in life course epidemiology

Edited by Deborah A. Lawlor and Gita D. Mishra

A Life Course Approach to Adult Health

Description

Family-based studies, including intergenerational, sibling, and twin studies, are increasingly being used to explore life course epidemiology. However, there are issues relating to study design and the statistical analysis of family-based studies that are still not well understood, and comprehending the underlying assumptions of these studies and drawing the inferences from them can be complex.

This book provides the knowledge and skills required to design, analyse, and correctly interpret family-based studies. It explains what these studies can tell us about life course epidemiology; provides practical guidance on how to set-up and maintain birth cohorts for completing family-based studies in life course epidemiology; describes how to undertake appropriate statistical analyses of family-based studies and correctly interpret results from these analyses; and provides examples that illustrate the ways in which family-based studies can enhance our understanding of life course epidemiology. In addition, there is discussion of difficulties specific to setting up such studies in low- and middle-income countries, and issues relating to proxy informants, where parents provide information on children and vice versa, or siblings provide information about each other. Examples of how family-based studies have been used in understanding the life course epidemiology of cardiovascular disease, mental health, and reproductive health illustrate the applicability of the research to these areas, but also more generally to the wider field of life course epidemiology.

Family matters

Designing, analysing and understanding family based studies in life course epidemiology

Edited by Deborah A. Lawlor and Gita D. Mishra

A Life Course Approach to Adult Health

1. Why family matters - an introduction, Debbie A. Lawlor & Gita D. Mishra
Section 1: What can family-based studies tell us about life course epidemiology?
2. Theoretical underpinning for the use of intergenerational studies in life course epidemiology, Debbie A. Lawlor, Sam Leary & George Davey Smith
3. Theoretical underpinning for the use of sibling studies in life course epidemiology, Kate W. Strully & Gita D. Mishra
4. Theoretical underpinning for the use of twin studies in life course epidemiology, Ruth J. F. Loos, Charlotte L. Ridgway & Ken K. Ong
5. Discussant chapter: summary of the theoretical approaches to family-based studies in life course epidemiology, Hazel M. Inskip
Section 2: The practicalities of undertaking family-based studies
6. Theoretical underpinning for the use of intergenerational studies in life birth cohorts: a resource for life course studies, Anne-Marie Nybo Andersen, Mia Madsen & Debbie A. Lawlor
7. Family-based life course studies in low- and middle-income countries, G. David Batty, Cesar G. Victora & Debbie A. Lawlor
8. Using available family members as proxies to provide information on other family members who are difficult to reach, Susannah Tomkins
9. Discussant chapter: the practicalities of undertaking family-based studies, Rebecca Hardy & Diana Kuh
Section 3: How to undertake statistical analyses of family-based studies
10. Statistical considerations in intergenerational studies, Dorothea Nitsch & Gita D. Mishra
11. Random effects models for sibling and twin-based studies in life course epidemiology, Samuli Ripatti
12. Discussant chapter: statistical considerations in family-based life course studies, Amanda Sacker
Section 4: Use of family-based studies in life course epidemiology
13. Family-based studies applied to the influence of early life factors on cardiovascular disease, Debbie A. Lawlor & David A. Leon
14. How family-based studies have added to the understanding of life course epidemiology of mental health, Stephani L. Hatch & Gita D. Mishra
15. How family-based studies have added to understanding the life course epidemiology of reproductive health, Susan M. B. Morton & Janet Rich Edwards
16. Discussant chapter: using family-based designs in life course epidemiology, John Lynch & Seungmi Yang
17. The future of family-based studies in life course epidemiology: challenges and opportunities, Gita Mishra & Debbie Lawlor

Family matters

Designing, analysing and understanding family based studies in life course epidemiology

Edited by Deborah A. Lawlor and Gita D. Mishra

A Life Course Approach to Adult Health

Author Information

Professor Deborah A. Lawlor completed medical training (University of Bristol) in 1986. She has an MPH (with distinction) from the University of Leeds, an MSc in Medical Statistics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD (MRC Training Fellowship, University of Bristol) in Epidemiology. She is the scientific director of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children mother's study and a co-director of the British Women's Heart and Health Study. She has contributed to understanding the life course and genetic epidemiology of insulin resistance, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and women's reproductive health, and has developed methods for improving causal inference in observational epidemiology by using family-based studies and genetic variants as instrumental variables for making causal inferences about modifiable non-genetic risk factors. She is the Deputy Director of the MRC Centre for Causal Analyses in Translational Epidemiology. Dr Gita D. Mishra has an MSc and a PhD in Statistics from the University of Auckland, New Zealand and was awarded Chartered Statistician status by the Royal Statistical Society in 2004. She is a senior research scientist at MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing, University College London and an adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Population Health, University of Queensland, Australia. She has extensive research experience in the fields of statistical methodology for longitudinal studies, life course epidemiology, and women's health. Her work on intergenerational mobility has revealed some of the links between the timing of changes in social class and their effects on later dietary patterns and the way that such influences differ for men and women. Her research on missing data techniques has led to the development of a practical methodology for the selection of variables to be included in a multiple imputation model both in the context of cross-sectional and life course data.

Contributors:

G. David Batty, Wellcome Trust fellow, Medical Research Council Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, UK
George Davey Smith, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, MRC Centre for Causal Analyses in Translational Epidemiology, Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, UK
Janet Rich Edwards, Director of Developmental Epidemiology, Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, USA
Rebecca Hardy, Senior Research Scientist, MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing; Reader in Epidemiology and Medical Statistics, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, UK
Stephani L. Hatch, Lecturer in Social Epidemiology, Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, UK
Diana Kuh, Director, MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing; Professor of Life Course, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, UK
Debbie A. Lawlor, Professor of Epidemiology, MRC Centre for Causal Analyses in Translational Epidemiology, Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, UK
Sam Leary, Lecturer in Statistics, Department of Oral and Dental Science, University of Bristol Dental School, UK
David A. Leon, Professor of Epidemiology, Non-communicable Diseases Epidemiology Unit, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK
Ruth J. F. Loos, MRC Group Leader, MRC Epidemiology Unit, Institute of Metabolic Science, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, UK
John Lynch, Professor of Epidemiology, Division of Health Sciences, University of South Australia, Australia; Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, UK; Department Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill University, Canada
Mia Madsen, Research fellow, Epidemiology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
Gita D. Mishra, Senior Research Scientist, MRC Unit for Lifelong Ageing and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, UK
Susan M. B. Morton, Senior Lecturer, Liggins Institute, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Dorothea Nitsch, Clinical Lecturer in Genetic Epidemiology, Non-communicable Disease Epidemiology Unit, Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK
Anne-Marie Nybo Andersen, Professor of Epidemiology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
Ken K. Ong, MRC Group Leader, MRC Epidemiology Unit, Institute of Metabolic Science, Addenbrooke's Hospital Cambridge, UK
Charlotte L. Ridgway, PhD student, MRC Epidemiology Unit, Institute of Metabolic Science, Addenbrooke's Hospital, UK
Samuli Ripatti, Researcher, FIMM Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland; Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Amanda Sacker, Research Professor, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, UK
Kate W. Strully, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Albany, USA
Susannah Tomkins, Lecturer, Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK
Cesar G. Victora, Professor of Epidemiology, Post-Graduate Programme in Epidemiology, Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Brazil
Seungmi Yang, Research Associate, Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill University, Canada

Family matters

Designing, analysing and understanding family based studies in life course epidemiology

Edited by Deborah A. Lawlor and Gita D. Mishra

A Life Course Approach to Adult Health

Reviews and Awards

"This book makes a valuable contribution to the field of life course epidemiology...it offers solid background and practical tools for researchers and should be included in life course epidemiology libraries."--Doody's