Role of microbiome, environment and parental factors in the health and development of offspring

It is ultimately accepted that healthy lifestyles of future parents are important for the health of their children. The fact that health is transmitted in families is supported by the increased risk of various diseases and conditions in some families. For example, pre-pregnancy BMI is linked to increased obesity in infants (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24246592/), whereas pre-pregnancy psychosocial factors have an effect on infant outcomes (DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30210-3). It is also established that centenarians more often have parents who live longer, whereas obesity and metabolic traits are more often shared within family members. This effect is partly determined by shared genetics, and multiple predisposing genetic variants associated to common traits have recently been identified (including research from our groups). However, it is often not possible to dissect the effect of genetics from the effect of shared environment and lifestyle, mainly because no large environmental analyses have been performed in relation to the health of future generations. In addition to this, there are also association studies related to the gut microbiome and health outcomes (including research also from our group) which suggest that microbiome also might play a role in health. Therefore, the analysis of the “vertical” transmission of health from one generation to another, by taking multi-level (longitudinal) factors into consideration, is of utmost importance.
Lifelines and Lifelines NEXT initiatives provide the unique opportunity to study genetic, microbial and environmental aspects of vertical health transmission from parents to children. Studies that explore the role of parental health on infant outcomes usually focus on health shortly before or during pregnancy (doi.org/10.1186/1742-4755-11-S1-S2). Lifelines gives us the absolutely unique opportunity for analysis of lifestyle, diet, health, environment and other factors that people experience many years before pregnancy and link this to children’s health, growth, diseases, and development. The availability of extensive environmental and lifestyle information, as well as genetics and biological measurements in future fathers and mothers’ years before pregnancy is absolutely unique. This data will allow for, not only association analyses of these factors to children’s health outcomes, but also for dissecting the combination of multiple environmental parameters, and the exploration of gene-environmental interactions in the “inheritance” of health. Longitudinal health analysis during pregnancy will allow for the dissection of perinatal factors from those factors that are important in the pre-pregnancy period. Longitudinal analysis of stool microbiome, breastmilk composition and microbiome, and other biological, immune and metabolic parameters will allow us to explore the mediation role of these parameters in babies health outcomes. This study will also give a unique opportunity to explore the role of preconception health and the lifestyles of future fathers, since so far these types of studies have mainly been focused on mothers.