The Northern Finland Birth Cohorts program (NFBC) was initiated in the 1960s in the two northernmost provinces of Finland to study risk factors involved in pre-term birth and intrauterine growth retardation, and the consequences of these early adverse events on subsequent morbidity and mortality. The uniqueness of NBFCs is that the data of the cohorts were obtained from early fetal life (including maternal health during pregnancy) to adulthood. The NFBC1966 includes 12,058 live births to mothers in the two northern-most provinces of Finland. Two decades later, a second cohort of 9432 births was obtained (NFBC1986). In NFBC1966 pregnancies were followed prospectively from the first antenatal contact (10-16th week). After birth, the offspring were examined and then again underwent clinical evaluation at ages 1y, 7y, 14-16y and 31y. At each visit, a wide range of phenotypic, lifestyle and demographic data were gathered by questionnaires and clinical examinations. For the most part, NFBC1986 has undergone similar evaluations to NFBC1966. Linkage to national registries includes hospitalization, deaths, education, medication, pensions, and provides up-to-date demographic and clinical information for members of both cohorts. DNA samples were obtained from 5,923 subjects from NFBC1966 and 6688 subjects from NFBC1986. Data coverage, 96% of all births in 1966 and 99% in 1986, is highly representative for the whole population. The NFBC program comprises more than 20 different projects coordinated by the Center of Lifecourse Disease studies in Northern Finland (COLD) at Oulu University. The prospective data collected from the NFBCs form a unique resource, allowing the study of disease emergence, and of the importance of genetic, biological, social and behavioral risk factors. The genome-wide association (GWA) study sponsored through the STAMPEED program of NHLBI employed genomic DNA samples previously collected by the NFBC1966 study and stored in the DNA repository of the National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland. This NHLBI sponsored RO1 project aimed to identify genetic variants contributing to metabolic and cardiovascular diseases (CVD). In addition to de-identified genome wide genotypic data, a selected list of phenotypic data related to CVD including weight, height, BMI, HDL, LDL, total cholesterol, triglyceride, glucose, insulin and fasting status, are also available in dbGaP. A summary of the GWAS for the NFBC1966 cardiovascular risk traits can be found in Sabatti et al., Nature Genetics 41: 35-46, 2009, PMID: <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19060910">19060910</a>. The version 2 release of this study contains sequence data from seventeen loci associated with levels of triglyceride, HDL-C, LDL-C, total cholesterol, fasting plasma glucose, and fasting plasma insulin (Kathiresan et al. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=18388691">2008</a>, Willer et al. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=18193043">2008</a>, Sabatti et al. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=19060910">2009</a>, Dupuis et al. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=20081858">2010</a>, Teslovich et al. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=20686565">2010</a>). At each locus, protein-coding regions and 5' and 3' untranslated regions of genes nearest to single nucleotide polymorphisms showing genome-wide significant association with metabolic syndrome-related traits, were sequenced. Targeted Illumina sequencing of 78 genes (~270kb) using 150bp probes was performed on 4943 subjects of the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 (NFBC1966). Whole exome sequencing on the Illumina platform was carried out on 586 of those participants. The sequencing study is part of a larger project that is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute's Allelic Spectrum in Common Disease Initiative, and comprises sequence data from more than 7000 individuals in two Finnish cohorts: NFBC1966 and the Finland-United States Investigation of NIDDM Genetics (FUSION) study.

STAMPEED: Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 (NFBC1966)

Genome-wide association analysis of metabolic traits in a birth cohort from a founder population

Groups at risk in low birth weight infants and perinatal mortality.