Sep 16, 2022
Born in Bradford’s Better Start: an experimental birth cohort study to evaluate the impact of early life interventions
- Josie Dickerson1,
- Philippa K. Bird1,
- Kate E. Pickett2,
- Dagmar Waiblinger1,
- Eleonora Uphoff2,
- Dan Mason1,
- Maria Bryant2,
- John Wright1,
- Rosie RC McEachan1
- 1Bradford Institute for Health Research;
- 2University of York
Protocol Citation: Josie Dickerson, Philippa K. Bird, Kate E. Pickett, Dagmar Waiblinger, Eleonora Uphoff, Dan Mason, Maria Bryant, John Wright, Rosie RC McEachan 2022. Born in Bradford’s Better Start: an experimental birth cohort study to evaluate the impact of early life interventions. protocols.io https://dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.8epv5j6q6l1b/v1
Manuscript citation:
Dickerson et al. BMC Public Health (2016) 16:711 DOI 10.1186/s12889-016-3318-0
License: This is an open access protocol distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Protocol status: Working
We use this protocol and it's working
Created: September 16, 2022
Last Modified: September 16, 2022
Protocol Integer ID: 70153
Abstract
Background: Early interventions are recognised as key to improving life chances for children and reducing
inequalities in health and well-being, however there is a paucity of high quality research into the effectiveness of
interventions to address childhood health and development outcomes. Planning and implementing standalone
RCTs for multiple, individual interventions would be slow, cumbersome and expensive. This paper describes the
protocol for an innovative experimental birth cohort: Born in Bradford’s Better Start (BiBBS) that will simultaneously
evaluate the impact of multiple early life interventions using efficient study designs. Better Start Bradford (BSB) has
been allocated £49 million from the Big Lottery Fund to implement 22 interventions to improve outcomes for
children aged 0–3 in three key areas: social and emotional development; communication and language
development; and nutrition and obesity. The interventions will be implemented in three deprived and ethnically
diverse inner city areas of Bradford.
Method: The BiBBS study aims to recruit 5000 babies, their mothers and their mothers’ partners over 5 years from
January 2016-December 2020. Demographic and socioeconomic information, physical and mental health, lifestyle
factors and biological samples will be collected during pregnancy. Parents and children will be linked to their
routine health and local authority (including education) data throughout the children’s lives. Their participation in
BSB interventions will also be tracked. BiBBS will test interventions using the Trials within Cohorts (TwiCs) approach
and other quasi-experimental designs where TwiCs are neither feasible nor ethical, to evaluate these early life
interventions. The effects of single interventions, and the cumulative effects of stacked (multiple) interventions on
health and social outcomes during the critical early years will be measured.
Discussion: The focus of the BiBBS cohort is on intervention impact rather than observation. As far as we are aware
BiBBS is the world’s first such experimental birth cohort study. While some risk factors for adverse health and social
outcomes are increasingly well described, the solutions to tackling them remain elusive. The novel design of BiBBS
can contribute much needed evidence to inform policy makers and practitioners about effective approaches to
improve health and well-being for future generations.
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