Family-based designs that disentangle inherited factors from pre- and postnatal environmental exposures: in vitro fertilization, discordant sibling pairs, maternal versus paternal comparisons, and adoption designs

Thapar, Anita ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3689-737X and Rice, Frances ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9484-1729 2021. Family-based designs that disentangle inherited factors from pre- and postnatal environmental exposures: in vitro fertilization, discordant sibling pairs, maternal versus paternal comparisons, and adoption designs. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine 11 (3) , a038877. 10.1101/cshperspect.a038877 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Identifying environmental risk and protective exposures that have causal effects on health is an important scientific goal. Many environmental exposures are nonrandomly allocated and influenced by dispositional factors including inherited ones. We review family-based designs that can separate the influence of environmental exposures from inherited influences shared between parent and offspring. We focus on prenatal exposures. We highlight that the family-based designs that can separate the prenatal environment from inherited confounds are different to those that are able to pull apart later-life environmental exposures from inherited confounds. We provide a brief review of the literature on maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct problems; these inconsistencies in the literature make a review useful and this illustrates that results of family-based genetically informed studies are inconsistent with a causal interpretation for this exposure and these two offspring outcomes.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Medicine MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG)
Publisher:	COLD SPRING HARBOR LAB PRESS,
ISSN:	2157-1422
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	23 April 2020
Last Modified:	06 May 2023 05:51
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/131165

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