After outlining standard taxonomy to facilitate discussion of study designs and target exposure associations, we highlight the methodological issues, focusing on the interplay between study design, analysis strategy, and the fact that outcomes may be related to family size. In this paper, we describe the methodological challenges inherent to multigenerational studies in human populations. Current strategies to obtain multigenerational data include exploiting birth registries and existing cohort studies, ascertaining exposures within them, and measuring outcomes across multiple generations. Without the relative control achieved in laboratory settings, however, population-based studies of multigenerational associations have had to use a broader range of study designs. An important task for epidemiology is to investigate these relationships in human populations. Laboratory-based animal research has revealed a number of exposures with multigenerational effects-ones that affect the children and grandchildren of those directly exposed.
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