The Canadian DOHaD cohort registry: a far-ReACHing Maelstrom Research initiative toward facilitating collaborative research

摘要

Background: Major financial and time investments in population-based studies worldwide have supported innovative research that has produced advanced understanding of the relation between various environmental and lifestyle exposures and health and disease outcomes. To optimize the value of such scientifically rich databases there is a need to establish cross-study collaborations and develop tools to support data discovery and co-analysis. Maelstrom Research aims to address some of the challenges of cross-study collaborations by providing the international research community with resources to leverage and support data documentation, integration, harmonization, and co-analysis. Maelstrom Research develops methods and software, conducts methodological research, generates comprehensive catalogues of study metadata, and creates infrastructures supporting data management, harmonization, and co-analysis. Methods: In 2016, Maelstrom Research launched the Research Advancement through Cohort Cataloguing and Harmonization (ReACH), a CIHR funded Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) research network. The objective of ReACH is to implement a comprehensive web-based catalogue and data harmonization platform to facilitate the use and co-analysis of data and biological samples collected by Canadian pregnancy and birth cohorts. ReACH is built on the close collaboration with 26 longitudinal studies that directly address the DOHaD theme representing 53,300 mother-child dyads and 17,800 fathers totaling 125,000 participants. The ReACH mandate is also to provide support and training to the users of its resources and when foreseen, assist investigators in the realization of their research projects involving integration, harmonization, and co-analysis of data from multiple studies. Results: The ReACH catalogue offers a web-based access to comprehensive descriptions of study as well as a complete list of variables collected. The metadata documented in the catalogue is freely available at www.maelstrom-research.org/mica/net-work/reach. The catalogue is under continual development as the metadata from more studies is added on a regular basis. The catalogue already covers detailed descriptions for almost all the participating studies and the complete information of the data and biological samples collected for several of them. The number of participants recruited by individual studies range from 200 to up to 16,000, the duration of follow-up range between 2 and 22 years with 18 of the studies still ongoing. The studies either followed their participants from pregnancy or have collected pregnancy-related information retrospectively. Once completed, hundreds of thousand variables will be documented in the ReACH catalogue. In addition, a search interface allows investigators to easily identify studies of interest and data items available to answer specific research questions. Conclusions: Ultimately, ReACH aims to enhance the potential for collaborative and cross-disciplinary research (outputs generated faster and at a lower cost), expand research perspectives (leverage national and international collaborations), improve quality of research practices, and foster the development of innovative evidence-based research on DOHaD. We encourage new studies and networks of studies to join Maelstrom Research efforts and invite investigators to make use of the ReACH resources for their research projects.