Effects of Socio-economic Inequalities in Childhood Respiratory Infections

Social determinants like parental education and household income have an important contribution to the high burden of respiratory infections in children.

Children from dissadvantage backgrounds tend to suffer from a higher disease burden than their more advantaged peers and are more likely to experience illness and disability as a result.

The pathways through which social determinants influence childhood respiratory infections are complex and inter-related, but in general are driven by differences in exposure and susceptibility to risk factors for respiratory infections that are influenced by the conditions in which children grow up.

However, there is surprisingly little evidence in the literature on the mechanisms underlying the association between social inequalities and childhood infections and their interaction with other early-life risk factors (e.g., behaviours, lifestyle, environmental conditions, etc).

The purpose of this project is to explore the social, geographic, and cultural patterns, and the pathways that relate social characteristics, early-life risk factors and childhood respiratory infections in order to understand the burden of such infections in children in Europe.

Understanding these patterns and pathways is vital to inform preventative policy and help reduce the unequal child health differences through effective public health interventions.

The project will use existing data from the EU Child Cohort Network on over 200,000 children from 16 European birth cohorts and a novel open-source infrastructure called DataSHIELD, that allows federated analysis of data from multiple cohorts without the need of sharing the participant level data.

The primary goal of the project is to provide crucial insights into the role of social determinants and early-life stressors in childhood respiratory infections with the aim to inform EU policies. The secondary goal is to provide to the research community an open-source tool for federated mediation analysis.