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Birth of a cohort — the first 20 years of the Raine study
Author(s) -
McKnight Charlotte M,
Newnham John P,
Stanley Fiona J,
Mountain Jenny A,
Landau Louis I,
Beilin Lawrence J,
Puddey Ian B,
Pennell Craig E,
Mackey David A
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
medical journal of australia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1326-5377
pISSN - 0025-729X
DOI - 10.5694/mja12.10698
Subject(s) - library science , cohort , medicine , computer science
n Th se I the beginning there was an idea ... and funding. e project might never have started if not for a rendipitous meeting between an accountant for the Raine Medical Research Foundation and a young obstetrician. The Foundation had been established 30 years earlier by the bequest of Mary Raine (Box 1), a successful businesswoman who left her property empire to the University of Western Australia (UWA) for medical research. The accountant mentioned that the Foundation had decided to award a large sum of money to one big, visionary project, and the very next day the grant application was underway. The obstetrician’s big idea, the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort, had two objectives: to investigate the hypothesis that complications of pregnancy might be prevented by frequent ultrasound scans, and to develop a long-term cohort to study the role that early life events have on later health. From 1989 to 1991, 2900 pregnant women were randomly assigned to either routine obstetric ultrasound or multiple scans.1 Extensive data were collected during pregnancy and the children were assessed at birth and at ages 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 14, 17, 18 and 20 years (Box 2). Questionnaire data, physical measurements and biological samples were collected looking at growth, cardiovascular, respiratory, immunological, musculoskeletal, nutritional, psychiatric, neurocognitive and ophthalmic health. The current dataset contains more than 85 000 measures on each participant, as well as 2.5 million genetic variants, with an exponential increase in publication output over time. Selected findings are summarised in Box 3.