9 min
Mums who smoke and their baby's birthweight DIAL
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- Education
In Episode 7 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Rita Pereira from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a member of DIAL’s Gene Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities(GEIGHEI) project, talks about her research looking at the links between mothers' smoking and their baby's birthweight.
The Interplay between Maternal Smoking and Genes in Offspring Birth Weight is a DIAL Working Paper by Rita Dias Pereira, Cornelius Rietveld and Hans van Kippersluis.
Transcript
In Episode 7 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Rita Pereira from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a member of DIAL’s Gene Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities(GEIGHEI) project, talks about her research looking at the links between mothers’ smoking and their baby’s birthweight.
The Interplay between Maternal Smoking and Genes in Offspring Birth Weight is a DIAL Working Paper by Rita Dias Pereira, Cornelius Rietveld and Hans van Kippersluis.
Christine Garrington 0:00
Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series, we discuss emerging findings from DIAL research. Our guest today is Rita Pereira from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, she has been looking at the relationships between genes, smoking and birth weight. I started by asking her about the background to the research.
Rita Pereira 0:22
So this research has been funded by NORFACE grant. And this grant had the idea of studying gene and environment, and particularly how they interact to generate health and education inequalities. So in other words, what this means is, we already know that both genes and environment matter for generating inequalities. But our question was whether there are particularly harmful or beneficial combinations of genes and environments, in determining inequalities. In this setting, we know that maternal smoking during pregnancy is harmful for the baby. And it is reflected in a low birth weight. And we also know that your genetic constituency will determine partially how heavy or light you're going to be born. So the question here is whether there are combinations that are particularly harmful for you.
Christine Garrington 1:26
Okay, so what was it about mothers who smoke that you specifically wanted to look at and why?
Rita Pereira 1:32
So we wanted to know whether smoking was particularly harmful for babies, depending on their children. So other possibility was also that some genetic variants protect you against smoking? Right? So in the end, the was not so much about the mothers who smoke, we know that smoking has detrimental effects for the baby. But we wanted to know if the risk of smoking would differ depending on the genes of the offspring.
Christine Garrington 2:01
Right. Okay, so your information came from two great data sources, I wonder if you can tell us something about them? You know, the detail how many people were involved? How those datasets work? and What people are asked that was relevant to your research?
Rita Pereira 2:14
Our main data set was a data set called ALSPAC, ALSPAC, which is from the UK, and it's a incredible data set is very detailed. And it followed pregnant women and their children that were born in the 90s, in area of risk though. And it's great for us because it has genetic information, both on the mother, on the baby. And it also has biomarkers so there are urine samples, blood samples that were collected from the mother, when they were pregnant. And it has 5000 to mother baby pairs, that are, that have genetic information on both the mother and the baby. And then we wanted to replicate our findings. And for that we use the UK Biobank. So as the name indicates, is also a dataset from the UK, and is a huge data set. So it has 500,000 individuals that are genotyped. But for our study, it has less variables that are relevant. So for example, we don't have materna
In Episode 7 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Rita Pereira from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a member of DIAL’s Gene Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities(GEIGHEI) project, talks about her research looking at the links between mothers' smoking and their baby's birthweight.
The Interplay between Maternal Smoking and Genes in Offspring Birth Weight is a DIAL Working Paper by Rita Dias Pereira, Cornelius Rietveld and Hans van Kippersluis.
Transcript
In Episode 7 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Rita Pereira from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a member of DIAL’s Gene Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities(GEIGHEI) project, talks about her research looking at the links between mothers’ smoking and their baby’s birthweight.
The Interplay between Maternal Smoking and Genes in Offspring Birth Weight is a DIAL Working Paper by Rita Dias Pereira, Cornelius Rietveld and Hans van Kippersluis.
Christine Garrington 0:00
Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series, we discuss emerging findings from DIAL research. Our guest today is Rita Pereira from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, she has been looking at the relationships between genes, smoking and birth weight. I started by asking her about the background to the research.
Rita Pereira 0:22
So this research has been funded by NORFACE grant. And this grant had the idea of studying gene and environment, and particularly how they interact to generate health and education inequalities. So in other words, what this means is, we already know that both genes and environment matter for generating inequalities. But our question was whether there are particularly harmful or beneficial combinations of genes and environments, in determining inequalities. In this setting, we know that maternal smoking during pregnancy is harmful for the baby. And it is reflected in a low birth weight. And we also know that your genetic constituency will determine partially how heavy or light you're going to be born. So the question here is whether there are combinations that are particularly harmful for you.
Christine Garrington 1:26
Okay, so what was it about mothers who smoke that you specifically wanted to look at and why?
Rita Pereira 1:32
So we wanted to know whether smoking was particularly harmful for babies, depending on their children. So other possibility was also that some genetic variants protect you against smoking? Right? So in the end, the was not so much about the mothers who smoke, we know that smoking has detrimental effects for the baby. But we wanted to know if the risk of smoking would differ depending on the genes of the offspring.
Christine Garrington 2:01
Right. Okay, so your information came from two great data sources, I wonder if you can tell us something about them? You know, the detail how many people were involved? How those datasets work? and What people are asked that was relevant to your research?
Rita Pereira 2:14
Our main data set was a data set called ALSPAC, ALSPAC, which is from the UK, and it's a incredible data set is very detailed. And it followed pregnant women and their children that were born in the 90s, in area of risk though. And it's great for us because it has genetic information, both on the mother, on the baby. And it also has biomarkers so there are urine samples, blood samples that were collected from the mother, when they were pregnant. And it has 5000 to mother baby pairs, that are, that have genetic information on both the mother and the baby. And then we wanted to replicate our findings. And for that we use the UK Biobank. So as the name indicates, is also a dataset from the UK, and is a huge data set. So it has 500,000 individuals that are genotyped. But for our study, it has less variables that are relevant. So for example, we don't have materna
9 min