The InterLACE study: design, data harmonization and characteristics across 20 studies on women's health

The International Collaboration for a Life Course Approach to Reproductive Health and Chronic Disease Events (InterLACE) project is a global research collaboration that aims to advance understanding of women's reproductive health in relation to chronic disease risk by pooling individual participant data from several cohort and cross-sectional studies. The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of contributing studies and to present the distribution of demographic and reproductive factors and chronic disease outcomes in InterLACE

Data_Sheet_1_Characterizing Adolescents' Dietary Intake by Taste: Results From the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey.docx

The taste of foods is a key factor for adolescents' food choices and intakes, yet, exploring taste characteristics of adolescents' diet is limited. Using food records for 284 adolescents (10–19 years old) from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS), year 9 (2016–2017), we classified diets according to taste. Tastes for each food consumed were generated from a previous survey that asked participants to allocate one main taste to each food. Responses from that survey were processed and included in a Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) to identify taste clusters. The resulting tastes were then applied to the adolescents' food records in the NDNS. For each individual, the total weight of food per day for each taste was calculated. A linear regression model was used to explore dietary intakes from each taste. Findings reveal that adolescents' daily energy intake was highest (34%) from foods that taste sweet. Sweet foods were the main calorie contributors at breakfast and daytime snacking, while energy intake from neutral-tasting foods was higher at lunch and dinner. Sweet food intake was significantly positively associated with higher energy, sugar, and fat intakes. For each percentage increase in sweet foods, energy increased by 10 kcal/d (95% CI 6, 15; P < 0.01). Savory food intake was lower in carbohydrates and sugars; with neutral food consumption inversely associated with energy, carbohydrate, sugars, saturated and total fat. Higher salty food intake was linked to higher saturated fat as well as sodium consumption. Sweet and neutral foods dominate the UK adolescent diet, followed by savory tastes. Balancing the contributions of different tasting foods could assist in improving adolescent diet quality.</p

Ethnic differences in the association between age at natural menopause and risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus among postmenopausal women: a pooled analysis of individual data from 13 cohort studies

Objective: To investigate associations between age at natural menopause, particularly premature ovarian insufficiency (POI; natural menopause before 40 years), and incident type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and identify any variations by ethnicity.Research design and methods: We pooled individual-level data of 338,059 women from 13 cohort studies without T2DM before menopause, with six ethnic groups: White (n=177,674), Chinese (n=146,008), Japanese (n=9,061), South/Southeast Asian (n=2,228), Black (n=1,838), and Mixed/Other (n=1,250). Hazard ratios (HRs) of T2DM associated with age at menopause were estimated in the overall sample and by ethnicity, with study as a random effect. For each ethnic group, we further stratified the association by birth year, education level, and BMI.Results: Over nine years of follow-up, 20,064 (5.9%) women developed T2DM. Overall, POI (vs menopause at 50-51 years) was associated with an increased risk of T2DM (HR:1.31, 1.20-1.44), while there was an interaction between age at menopause and ethnicity (pConclusions: POI and early menopause are risk factors for T2DM in postmenopausal women, with considerable variation across ethnic groups, and may need to be considered in risk assessments of T2DM among women.</p

An exploration of the longitudinal relation between parental feeding practices and child anthropometric adiposity measures from the West Midlands Active Lifestyle and Healthy Eating in Schoolchildren (WAVES) Study

Background: Some research suggests that parent or carer feeding practices may influence children's weight patterns, but longitudinal evidence is limited and inconsistent. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the relation between various parent or carer feeding practices when a child is aged 7-8 y and proxy measurements of child adiposity at age 8-9 y (weight status, waist-to-height ratio, and body fat percentage). Design: The study was a secondary analysis of data from the West Midlands Active Lifestyle and Healthy Eating in Schoolchildren (WAVES) Study comprising a diverse sample of parents and carers and their children from 54 primary schools in the West Midlands, England [n = 774 parent-child dyads (53% of the WAVES study sample)]. Information on feeding practices was collected with the use of subscales from the Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire, completed by the child's main parent or carer (self-defined). Child height, weight, bioelectrical impedance, and waist circumference were measured and converted into 3 proxy measurements of adiposity (weight status, waist-to-height ratio, and body fat percentage). Associations between these measurements and parent or carer feeding practices were examined with the use of mixed-effects logistic regression models. Results: Of the questionnaire respondents, 80% were mothers, 16% were fathers, and 4% were other carers. Median standardized subscale scores ranged from 1.7 (emotion regulation: IQR = 1.0) to 4.0 (monitoring and modeling: IQR = 1.5), and significantly different subscale scores were present between child weight statuses for emotion regulation, pressure to eat, and restriction for weight control. Logistic regression modeling showed that when baseline adiposity measures were included as covariates, all associations between parental feeding practices at age 7-8 y and measures of adiposity at age 8-9 y were attenuated. Conclusions: Observed relations between various parental feeding practices and later adiposity are mitigated by inclusion of the baseline adiposity measure. This finding lends support to the theory of reverse causation, whereby the child's size may influence parental choice of specific feeding practices rather than the child's subsequent weight status being a consequence of these feeding practices