[Communicating data of the Italian NINFEA birth cohort]

"In March 2016, the website of the NINFEA project (an Internet-based cohort set up to investigate the effects of exposures acting early in life) was enriched with the section «Data», which reports aggregated data for selected variables of the cohort. This article discusses the rationale for this new section, available data and their possible uses are described, and some results are compared with figures accessible from surveillance studies. The Italian birth cohort NINFEA includes 7,500 pregnant women, recruited through the Internet from 2005 to June 2016, and of their children, followed up with repeated questionnaires. Thus, the «Data» section is based on a selected population. Currently, this new section includes information on maternal lifestyles/characteristics in pregnancy (e.g., alcohol, smoking, use of medications), child health (e.g., obesity, asthma symptoms, growth) and behaviours (e.g., sleeping patterns, being breastfed). Up to December 18th, 2017, its pages were visited 12,620 times. Prevalences for selected variables (e.g., prepregnancy body mass index, breast feeding, infant sleeping position) are similar to those reported by surveillance studies. Aggregated exposure and outcome data from large cohorts can be systematically made publicly available. These data may be of interest to the participants, to population subgroups whose characteristics are similar to the study participants, and to researchers and policy makers, whenever similar data are not available from population-based surveillance systems."