Consortium for the Study of Pregnancy Treatments (Co-OPT) : An international birth cohort to study the effects of antenatal corticosteroids

• Published in: PLOS ONE
• Main Authors: Frier, Emily M., Lin, Chun, Reynolds, Rebecca M., Allegaert, Karel, Been, Jasper V., Fraser, Abigail, Gissler, Mika, Einarsdóttir, Kristjana, Florian, Lani, Jacobsson, Bo, Vogel, Joshua P., Zoega, Helga, Bhattacharya, Sohinee, Krispin, Eyal, Pedersen, Lars Henning, Roberts, Devender, Kuhle, Stefan, Fahey, John, Mol, Ben W., Burgner, David, Schuit, Ewoud, Sheikh, Aziz, Wood, Rachael, Gyamfi-Bannerman, Cynthia, Miller, Jessica E., Duhig, Kate, Lahti-Pulkkinen, Marius, Hadar, Eran, Wright, John, Murray, Sarah R., Stock, Sarah J.
• Other Authors: Faculty of Medicine
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Infant; Newborn; Pregnancy; Child; Humans; Female; Preschool; Birth Cohort; Premature Birth/epidemiology; Child Health; Family; Adrenal Cortex Hormones/therapeutic use; Multidisciplinary; Canada; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11815/4443; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282477

Funding Information: The Co-OPT ACS study is funded through a Wellcome Trust Clinical Career Development Fellowship grant (Funding Reference number 209560/Z/17) awarded to Sarah J Stock. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The Sponsor of the study is the University of Edinburgh (www.ed.ac. uk), Sponsor reference AC19119. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. Publisher Copyright: Copyright: © 2023 Frier et al. This is an open access article 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. Background Antenatal corticosteroids (ACS) are widely prescribed to improve outcomes following preterm birth. Significant knowledge gaps surround their safety, long-term effects, optimal timing and dosage. Almost half of women given ACS give birth outside the “therapeutic window” and have not delivered over 7 days later. Overtreatment with ACS is a concern, as evidence accumulates of risks of unnecessary ACS exposure. Methods The Consortium for the Study of Pregnancy Treatments (Co-OPT) was established to address research questions surrounding safety of medications in pregnancy. We created an international birth cohort containing information on ACS exposure and pregnancy and neonatal outcomes by combining data from four national/provincial birth registers and one hospital database, and follow-up through linked population-level data from death registers and electronic health records. Results and discussion The Co-OPT ACS cohort contains 2.28 million pregnancies and babies, born in Finland, Iceland, Israel, Canada and Scotland, between 1990 and 2019. Births from 22 to 45 weeks’ gestation were included; 92.9% were at term (≥ 37 completed weeks). 3.6% of babies were ...