Who are the Children of the 90s?

If you were down on Bristol Harbourside this weekend you may have noticed an event at MShed, or heard mention of ‘Children of the 90s’. Who are these children, and what were they doing at the museum? The answer involves a journey more than 20 years back in time, and the vision and foresight of Bristol Professor Jean Golding.

Children of the 90s, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (or ALSPAC), is a birth cohort – a resource used by epidemiologists to study patterns in population health. A sample of people is selected and then followed over time, and the data collected can be used to answer all sorts of questions. In the case of ALSPAC the sample was recruited from every woman with a pregnancy due date in 1991 and 1992 in the area at the time called Avon. About 14,000 women signed up, and they and their children have been monitored ever since. Golding, however, conceived the project that would eventually become ALSPAC five years before then. Writing about the methodology of the study, she states that its objectives were to ‘understand the ways in which the physical and social environments interact over time with genetic inheritance to affect health, behaviour and development in infancy, childhood and then into adulthood’. No meagre ambition then.

Aside from the time scale of the project, what makes ALSPAC so unique and important? It’s partly the sheer amount of data that’s been collected. From bodily fluids to questionnaires, interviews with psychologists to full body scans, these children and their mothers have been measured in most ways imaginable. And nothing’s been thrown away; even the placentas are rumoured to have been stored in a freezer somewhere in the bowels of the building! The great thing about this hoarding is that when new techniques become available, the original samples are there to analyse. Take genetics: in 1991 the human genome project had barely begun, but Golding still wanted genetic data to be collected even though it couldn’t then be analysed. ALSPAC now has genome-wide data for a huge number of the mums and children in the study, and the equipment in-house to sample yet more.

Technology has somewhat caught up with Golding’s vision, but there’s always further to go. The new science of Epigenetics is being investigated using ALSPAC data. Epigenetics investigates whether lifestyle information can be genetically inherited in ways other than through DNA code - for example, whether the behaviours of boys during early puberty (when sperm is being created) could affect those boys’ sons or even grandsons. The study is truly on the cutting edge of research. And it’s global too: across the world there are around 1000 research projects registered to use the data, with hundreds of these active at any one time.

So far, so science, but why then is ALSPAC such an important part of Bristol? What comes across in the exhibition is the pride that participants feel about their inclusion in the study; they are providing data that might help others in the future. And by all accounts it’s fun - ‘who else would we allow to draw on our children and encourage them to stare endlessly at a poster stuck on a ceiling’, wrote one Mum when asked what the study meant to her. The children also seem to really value the research, despite having been prodded and poked since before they can remember. ‘Keep working hard & discovering more wonderful things. I’m proud to be a child of the 90s’, were the words of one participant. The mutual respect and gratitude the participants and researchers have for each other has allowed the study to run for 20 years, and there’s no reason it can’t run for at least 20 more.

And what does the future hold for the Children of the 90s? Some of the young people are now having children of their own - soon there could be Children of Children of the 90s, to add a further generational layer to the mix. More data is being collected from the fathers and siblings too, making even more detailed study possible. The MShed exhibition is being digitised and will appear on the ALSPAC website very soon - keep your eyes peeled!

NB This article appeared in an edited form in 5/12/11 issue of University of Bristol's Epigram newspaper.