Project Viva Cohort Publication
Dr Emily Oken, Viva Co-Principal Investigator, led a team of investigators in an overall description of the Project Viva pre-birth cohort, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2014. This paper provides a fairly detailed scientific summary of what we do in Project Viva, how we do it, and why. Read about the Project Viva cohort in an abstract published by the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Abstract
We established Project Viva to examine prenatal diet and other factors in relation to maternal and child health. We recruited pregnant women at their initial prenatal visit in eastern Massachusetts between 1999 and 2002. Exclusion criteria included multiple gestation, inability to answer questions in English, gestational age ≥22 weeks at recruitment and plans to move away before delivery. We completed in-person visits with mothers during pregnancy in the late first (median 9.9 weeks of gestation) and second (median 27.9 weeks) trimesters. We saw mothers and children in the hospital during the delivery admission and during infancy (median age 6.3 months), early childhood (median 3.2 years) and mid-childhood (median 7.7 years). We collected information from mothers via interviews and questionnaires, performed anthropometric and neurodevelopmental assessments and collected biosamples. We have collected additional information from medical records and from mailed questionnaires sent annually to mothers between in-person visits and to children beginning at age 9 years. From 2341 eligible women, there were 2128 live births; 1279 mother-child pairs provided data at the mid-childhood visit. Primary study outcomes include pregnancy outcomes, maternal mental and cardiometabolic health and child neurodevelopment, asthma/atopy and obesity/cardiometabolic health.
Investigators interested in learning more about how to obtain Project Viva data can contact project_viva@hphci.harvard.edu.
Oken E, Baccarelli AA, Gold DR, Kleinman KP, Litonjua AA, De Meo D, Rich-Edwards JW, Rifas-Shiman SL, Sagiv S, Taveras EM, Weiss ST, Belfort MB, Burris HH, Camargo CA Jr, Huh SY, Mantzoros C, Parker MG, Gillman MW. Cohort profile: Project Viva. Int J Epidemiol. 2015 Feb;44(1):37-48. doi: 10.1093/ije/dyu008. Epub 2014 Mar 16. PubMed PMID: 24639442; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4339753.