Ambitious study focuses on children's health, illness

The goal is to follow 100,000 kids into adulthood to discern how interactions between genes and the environment lead to disease.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. May 3, 2004.

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is in the midst of planning the National Children's Study. This ambitious project intends to follow 100,000 children from womb to age 21 starting in 2006. It would bring together industry and science in the hope of determining how environmental factors impact children's health and which genes can make that impact better or worse.

"There are a number of conditions of children that are serious and burdensome for which we have evidence that there are potential causes or contributors but we just don't have enough scientific evidence for conclusions and necessary actions or interventions," said Peter Scheidt, MD, MPH, director of the study's program office.

Many of those involved describe the effort as one similar to the Women's Health Initiative, only geared to children. Their hope is to answer questions related to learning disabilities, asthma, autism, cancer, addiction, hearing problems and other medical conditions. Is sudden infant death syndrome more common among infants who do not use pacifiers? How do smoking cessation programs for parents affect children? What chemicals in the environment affect the risk of injury and violence?

"The chance to evaluate a large number of children starting at birth and then following them into early adulthood to try to answer some of these questions is very exciting," said Dennis R. Ownby, MD, a member of one of the working groups and professor of pediatrics and medicine at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.