October 2024

APPAP met virtually in October for their latest meeting. Lynn Molloy chaired the meeting and there was a great turnout with eleven (out of sixteen) members attending the meeting.

Lynn started the meeting by announcing that ALSPAC has been funded by the MRC and Wellcome Trust for another five years. ALSPAC has recently finished a very big data collection sweep seeing 12,000 participants from different generations and the focus over the next five years will be on tracking important life events, particularly the pregnancies, of the G1 cohort (now in their early thirties).

Professor Abi Fraser attended to seek the views of APPAP on how best to communicate the updated G2, children of the children (COCO90s), strategy to participants over the next five years. To date ALSPAC has used different logos (red for the main study and orange for the COCO90s part of the study). These represent different parts of the study, with only those with enrolled children taking part in the COCO90’s part of the study. There were mixed views but most thought that it would be less confusing to have the recognisable red logo only. We are one study, and one logo would demonstrate this well. There was a discussion about who would be included in the COCO90’s study. Abi explained that the focus will be on the G1 pregnancy and the impact of this pregnancy on the G1 participant either female or male). Overwhelmingly APPAP felt that the participant letters and enrolment forms were confusing and recommended that they were made clearer.

Later in the meeting there was a discussion about improvements to APPAP such as the move to a Teams group to make communication easier and the creation of a dedicated webpage to explain the work of APPAP. The terms of reference were discussed, and the team encouraged a member of APPAP to chair or co-chair future meetings.  From the December meeting ALSPAC will provide feedback from previous research proposals that were discussed at APPAP, and researchers will be to complete a proposal from providing all the information APPAP need to fully understand the research and the impact on participants.  

Finally, there was a discussion about an upcoming paper on cognitive difference in childhood which has used ALSPAC data in its analysis. The author would like to write a ‘frequently asked questions’ document in lay language to accompany the paper and asked for a member of APPAP to help with this. We were able to provide a volunteer for this and look forward to hearing how this went.

We are extremely grateful to all APPAP panel members for their contributions and commitment to ALSPAC.