Over the next 25 years, actions by families in the St. Louis area will help improve the health of children in the U.S. through participation in the National Children’s Study.
Children in the confidential study will be followed from conception to age 21. It was mandated by Congress in 2000.
The Saint Louis University School of Public Health is leading the study locally, and workers will go door-to-door in the next several weeks in randomly-selected neighborhoods in St. Louis to identify women who are pregnant, or planning to become pregnant, and who consent to participate in the study. Researchers will observe environmental and genetic influences on their children’s health.
They’ll be asked about family history, diet, medications, smoking habits, chemicals they use in their home, what they are exposed to at work, level of physical activity, where they will deliver their child and where they get their medical care, according to Louise Flick, principal investigator for the National Children’s Study Gateway Center and professor of epidemiology at the SLU School of Public Health.
The study is expected to attract more than 100,000 participants, with several U.S. locations serving as study sites. A thousand women will be recruited in the St. Louis area over the next five years.
After initial brief interviews, in February investigators will start to collect biological samples and environmental samples, Flick explained.
“If they are in the pre-pregnancy sample, there is a pre-pregnancy visit; in pregnancy there are three visits; there is a visit in the hospital; and then I think there are three visits in the first year and then it begins to decrease,” Flick said.
Dr. Edwin Trevathan, dean of the SLU School of Public Health, said among the earlier measures of the National Children’s Study will be outcomes that relate to prematurity and infant mortality, child health issues of critical importance here in St. Louis and nationally. He said the 25-year time frame for the study makes it a multigenerational health effort.
“There are problems that we didn’t think about 20-25 years ago. There was no discussion of H1N1 influenza, SARS, of an obesity epidemic. Many of these issues remind us that we do not know what the great challenges of the next 10, 20, 30 years will be in health,” Trevathan said.
“This really is an investment in the health questions and problems of future generations, even though we don’t know what those questions or problems will be.”
Co-investigator Vetta Sanders-Thompson, associate professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, said data provided in St. Louis will be part of a nationally representative sample. However, we may not have to wait 25 years for all of the results.
“If we find that there is some significance, and there is some component of the local data that can be analyzed appropriately with some validity and reliability, then we will be attempting to do that,” said Sanders-Thompson, who is responsible for community engagement for the study in the St. Louis area and.
The National Children’s Study is the largest study ever conducted in the U.S. to learn about the health and development of children. SLU, Washington University, Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville and the Battelle Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation in St. Louis all participate in the local research team.
For more information, visit www.NationalChildrensStudy.gov.
