Azad - CHILD study and EDI

So in Manitoba, we’ve done an interesting study in the CHILD cohort where we use data from the CHILD study and then we linked it to administrative data from the government where the early development instrument has been given out to children in kindergarten. 

So this is something that’s done routinely by the government and those data are available for research. And so we were able to get permission from the CHILD study participants to bring that data into our study, which gave us a unique opportunity to look at those early development scores and see how they’re related to this wealth of data we’ve collected in the CHILD study. This is something that couldn’t be done by either data set alone. So we have a really nice, you know, province-wide data set on the EDI scores for all the children in kindergarten. 

But for all those children, we don’t know anything about the stress they may have experienced early in life or the nutrition of their moms while they were pregnant. These are data that don’t exist in the government databases. And on the flip side, in CHILD, we have all this interesting data about microbiomes and stress and mental health of parents, but we didn’t do early development assessments, so it was really nice to be able to bring those together.