Sammanfattning
Large population-based research cohorts, together with national health registries and biobanks
are core
components in a modern infrastructure for knowledge. Along with the other Nordic countries, Norway
has
unique opportunities for high quality research based on cohorts, biobanks and registries. Cohorts,
biobanks
and registries provide a basis for discovering causes and mechanisms of disease as well as for
following the
development of disease, effects of treatment and consequences of disease. The purpose of this
manuscript is
to give a brief outline of a project that makes use of these unique opportunities by using data from
The
Norwegian Mother and Child cohort study (MoBa) to address research questions of common interest,
and
thus encourage other research groups to use this "happy hunting ground".
The present study, Causal Pathways for Asthma (CASPAR) funded by the Research Council of
Norway,
is a subproject of MoBa. The project is designed to take advantage of the potential for research on
human
biological material in biobanks, by coupling analysis results with data from health surveys, health
registries
and the health services. The present study is based on an ongoing collaboration between the
Norwegian Institute
of Public Health (NIPH), the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in the US
and several other national and international collaborators within The MoBa Asthma Group. The main
aim of
the study is to examine a number of hypothesis regarding in utero and early life exposures in
relation to the
development of different phenotypes of asthma and allergies in childhood.
For the majority of children who become asthmatic and allergic, the differentiation of their immune
system
into an atopic phenotype probably begins before birth and is established within the first six years of
life.
This study will advance knowledge of the mechanisms whereby diet and environmental exposures
influences
gene expression to alter risk of atopic disease. The prime purpose is to build up new knowledge on
asthma pathogenesis. There is a great need to develop a new paradigm of disease pathogenesis that
takes
advantages of applied molecular approaches to asthma and atopic diseases as it occurs in humans
at different
stages of development. This project takes advantage not only of the basic MoBa samples and
infrastructure
including links to other national health registries, but also a new national supplementary study of
MoBa that
includes measures of prenatal exposures in maternal plasma believed to have epigenetic influences
on
asthma/atopy development and data on genome wide methylation of cord blood DNA.