ALGAE Protocol: An automated protocol for assigning early life exposures to longitudinal cohort studies

An automated protocol for assigning early life exposures to longitudinal cohort studies

ALGAE is an automated protocol to assess historical exposure to air pollutants for members of longitudinal cohort studies. It was developed as part of a research project between the Small Area Health Statistics Unit(SAHSU), Imperial College London and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children(ALSPAC).

Initially designed to support an environmental epidemiological study on air pollution exposure during pregnancy and respiratory health effects in children, the protocol has since been developed into a generic solution which can be adapted to investigate different life stages and environmental pollutants. ALGAE is intended as a generic and reusable exposure study protocol to:

  • reconstruct residential address histories of longitudinal cohort studies
  • assign exposure estimates to cohort participants based on residential address
  • aggregate exposure estimates over different time periods such as pregnancy, infancy, and adolescence.

Initially ALGAE was designed to support a study on "Effects of early life exposure to particles on respiratory health through childhood and adolescence". It has since been developed into a generic solution which can be adapted to different cohort studies, life stages, health outcomes and environmental exposures.

For detailed description of the methodologies and algorithms used please see our section on Methodology.

The website is intended for people who want to:

  • Learn about information governance considerations when integrating exposure information into longitudinal studies
  • Learn from the ALGAE design before building their own software
  • Adapt the ALGAE code to use in a different cohort study;
  • Adapt the ALGAE code to suit different use cases within ALSPAC
  • Borrow parts of the code for other projects using ALSPAC data
More information on the design decisions made in the development of ALGAE see our section on Protocol Design.

To support the protocol we have developed test cases using the SAHSU-ALSPAC as example.. The code can be modified to include different life stages, environmental pollutants or covariates. Please see our sections on adapting the code.

How to Cite and License It

The ALGAE Protocol has been developed by SAHSU and is available under the GPL v3.0 open source license. If you use the software, please cite our paper, which was published in the Environmental Modelling and Software. We recommend you site a published version of the code base version.

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