Completed projects

The FP-7 InterConnect project used exemplar projects to understand the real-life implementation issues associated with the federated meta-analysis approach and 4 major projects were completed.

A collaborative grouping of 8 international studies formed around the research question ‘What is the association between physical activity during pregnancy on neonatal adiposity?’ with the resulting publication:

Associations between maternal physical activity in early and late pregnancy and offspring birth size: remote federated individual level meta-analysis from eight cohort studies. S Pastorino et al. BJOG 2019 doi: 10.1111/1471-0528.15476.

Following this, a series of collaborations have worked together to investigate the relationship between various dietary factors and new-onset type 2 diabetes:

• Fish consumption (28 studies)
• Legume, Pulse, and Soy consumption (27 studies)
• Exploratory dietary patterns (25 studies)
• Total and types of meat consumption (31 studies)

Not all the studies (total of around 50) took part in each project, depending on their research interests and data availability.

These four projects led to the following publications:

Heterogeneity of Associations between Total and Types of Fish Intake and the Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes: Federated Meta-Analysis of 28 Prospective Studies Including 956,122 Participants. Pastorino S, Bishop T, Sharp SJ, et al. Nutrients. 2021;13(4):1223. Published 2021 Apr 7. doi:10.3390/nu13041223

Associations of Total Legume, Pulse, and Soy Consumption with Incident Type 2 Diabetes: Federated Meta-Analysis of 27 Studies from Diverse World Regions. Pearce M, Fanidi A, Bishop TRP, et al.  J Nutr. 2021;151(5):1231-1240. doi:10.1093/jn/nxaa447

Associations between exploratory dietary patterns and incident type 2 diabetes: a federated meta-analysis of individual participant data from 25 cohort studies. Jannasch, F., Dietrich, S., Bishop, T.R.P. et al. Eur J Nutr 61, 3649–3667 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00394-022-02909-9

Meat consumption and incident type 2 diabetes: an individual-participant federated meta-analysis of 1·97 million adults with 100 000 incident cases from 31 cohorts in 20 countries. Li, Chunxiao et al. The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Volume 12, Issue 9, 619 – 630. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(24)00179-7

Participating studies

The InterConnect approach allows cohorts flexibility in the projects that they take part in and the method they use to contribute to a project. A cohort may join some projects but not others, depending on their research interests and data availability. Different cohorts have varying resources and expertise, and the InterConnect approach allows them to take part in a project via:

• Federated meta analysis
• Accessing data via existing secure analysis environments offered by institutions hosting cohort data (also known as Trusted Research Environments)
• Traditional data transfers
• Results sharing where analysts at the local institution generate results that are returning to the researcher leading the project

This flexibility has allowed an extensive group of cohorts to contribute to projects.