Cohort Profile: The Gateshead Millennium Study

The Gateshead Millennium Baby Study (GMBS) originated from the observation that slower than expected weight gain in infancy, traditionally known as failure to thrive, but more recently as ‘weight faltering’, had never been satisfactorily explained. There were methodological problems associated with much previous research. The first was the use of attained weight criteria to identify slow weight gain in infancy, which confounds poor postnatal weight gain with poor prenatal weight gain. The second was the use of referred samples of children, leading to selection biases. The third was the use of retrospective accounts from parents after poor weight gain had already been identified. The GMBS was thus originally designed to investigate the antecedents of weight faltering in a population-based prospective study that addressed the main methodological problems of previous research