2. SHAPES Individual Participant Data Study

This phase of the study is exploring research projects that are similar to SHAPES from across the world. The aim of this phase is to work together with international researchers to learn from the different research projects.

Exploring whether the findings from the cohort study of SHAPES are similar to findings in other populations is important to understand if the findings from SHAPES are similar to other populations outside of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK.

An update of progress: June 2025

We identified 93 other research studies across different countries that had similar data to SHAPES. Authors were invited to join the SHAPES-IPD Collaborative Group to work with us and share their research data. We are currently working with data from 20 studies, from 15 countries, that included over 15 thousand pregnancies. We are also working with other researchers who were not able to share their data to see how they can be involved in SHAPES-IPD.

We are now doing analysis of the research data from the 20 studies. We are going to be comparing whether the results are similar in the 20 studies to the results from the SHAPES study in Newcastle