Adriëtte Oostvogels

4 103 Maternal lipids and offspring’s lipids & glucose Subjects and Methods ABCD study The current study was part of a large prospective population-based birth cohort, the Amsterdam Born Children and their Development (ABCD) study. The main goal of this study is to assess the extent to which maternal conditions during pregnancy and early-life conditions explain the child’s health at birth as well as in later life (http://www.abcd-study.nl) . This study was conducted according to the guidelines laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki and all procedures involving human subjects were approved by the Central Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects, the Medical Research Ethics Committees of the participating hospitals, and the Registration Committee of the municipality of Amsterdam. Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects. Study population and design Between January 2003 and March 2004 all pregnant women in Amsterdam (n=12373) were approached to participate at their first visit to their obstetric care provider (Figure 2). Part of these women completed a questionnaire about lifestyle, medical history and socio-demographic characteristics at 16 weeks of gestation (IQR 12-20 weeks) and gave an additional blood sample during routine blood collection in the prenatal visit. Women with unreliable lipid measurements (based on the HIL (haemolysis, icterus, lipemia) indices), or suffering from hepatitis B, thyroid disease or using lipid-altering medication were excluded, as were women with unknown gestational age at blood sampling. Only women with children who participated in the ABCD health check and of whose offspring we had overnight fasting blood samples collected at a mean age of 5.7 years were included. We excluded preterm born (<32 weeks) children and/or children with congenital anomalies or using lipid- altering medication, as well as children lacking information on body fat percentage. Finally, the final study population consisted of 1133 mother-child pairs (Figure 2).