International Childhood Cancer Cohort Consortium
The International Childhood Cancer Cohort Consortium (I4C) is an alliance of several large-scale prospective cohort studies of children to pool data and biospecimens from individual cohorts to study various modifiable and genetic factors in relation to cancer risk. This initiative brings together international multidisciplinary teams of epidemiologists, basic scientists, and clinicians, to collaborate on investigations into the role of early-life exposures on cancer risk.
Leukemia, including acute lymphoblastic leukemia and acute myeloid leukemia, is the most common type of childhood cancer in most Western populations. For this reason, the I4C will initially concentrate on conducting studies of etiology of childhood leukemia. The I4C will focus on questions that this collaboration can best answer and that require longitudinal data collection in very large samples. Initial studies will use available prospective data to assess exposures postulated to cause specific types of childhood cancer as suggested by past work based primarliy on case-control studies. The first two hypotheses proposed for analysis will examine the relationships between chromosomal translocation present at birth with childhood leukemia and folic acid supplementation during pregnancy and childhood leukemia.
For more information, contact Martha Linet.