keeping track of the kids.
by Ramona Dubose
For the next three decades, Carolina researchers will study the food children in Duplin County, North Carolina, eat—along with the air they breathe, the schools they attend, and even the dust in their homes—as part of a national study of children in the United States.
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has selected UNC-Chapel Hill as one of six institutions nationwide—and the only institution in the South—to kick off the National Children’s Study, an unprecedented effort examining how environmental, social, behavioral, biological, and community factors affect children in the United States.
Researchers from the School of Public Health and the Carolina Population Center will lead Carolina’s efforts. For the initial phase of the study, Carolina will focus on Duplin County. As a first, or “vanguard,” site, Duplin County will help determine the final study protocol to be used nationwide.
The full National Children’s Study will follow a representative sample of children from early life through adulthood, seeking information to prevent and treat such health problems as autism, birth defects, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
“This is a very ambitious study,” says Nancy Dole, deputy director of the Carolina Population Center. “It’s important to start with a few sites so we can get the details worked out, and then implement the study uniformly throughout the country.”
Other North Carolina counties that will join the study later are Buncombe, Burke, Cumberland, Durham, Gaston, and Rockingham.
“We’re excited about the challenges that lie ahead,” says David Savitz, professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health and a fellow at the Carolina Population Center. “Duplin is a rural county with about fifty-one thousand residents, so we’ll be working with a large portion of the people there. Our hope is that we’ll be able to provide services and information that Duplin residents will find useful, and that we’ll bring increased attention to this community that helps to improve the health of their children.”
Carolina researchers, along with collaborators at Duke University and Battelle Memorial Institute, will survey the population to identify women who are pregnant or who are of childbearing age. They plan to start enrolling Duplin County women in the study in July 2007 and hope to eventually enroll around twelve hundred.
The National Children’s Study will identify some one hundred thousand children at more than one hundred sites nationwide as early as possible during their mothers’ pregnancies. By tracking the health and development of these children throughout their childhoods, the study will provide researchers, public health officials, health-care providers, educators, and others who work with children with a resource from which to develop prevention strategies, health and safety guidelines, educational approaches, and possibly new treatments and cures for health conditions.
For more information on the study, please visit the National Children's Study web site.