About 1,000 Durham families are expected to participate in a national health study that monitors children between their birth and 21st birthdays.
Durham County was randomly selected earlier this month as one of 105 locations nationwide to participate in the National Children’s Study, which will track 100,000 children across the country to investigate the relationship between environment and health and development. The study aims to inform research concerning birth defects, injuries, asthma, obesity, diabetes, behavior, learning and mental health disorders, according to the study’s website.
Researchers from Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Battelle Memorial Institute will lead the study in the county. The team is seeking pregnant mothers and hopes to enroll 250 children per year for the next four years.
“This is an incredible study of environment and children’s health,” said Barbara Entwisle, principle investigator for the North Carolina Study Center and Kenan Distinguished Professor of sociology professor and interim vice chancellor for research and economic development at UNC. “It’s really important to take a broad approach to understanding the environment in health.”
The locations across the country were selected to reflect the range of situations in which American children grow up. The strength of such a diverse subject pool is that the data will represent the country at large, said Anna Maria Siega-Riz, a member of the research team and an associate chair of the department of epidemiology at UNC.
In Durham, researchers will recruit participants through medical care providers’ offices. Durham is “uniquely poised” because it has a connected medical community and the ability to take advantage of local university resources, said Dr. Emmanuel Walter, principal site investigator for Durham County and associate director of the Primary Care Research Consortium at the Duke Clinical Research Institute.
He added that the study is unique because it will consider a very wide range of factors that affect development.
“Environment is defined very broadly for this study: the places that kids play, the homes they grow up in... media influences, dietary intakes,” Walter said.
The consideration of the many factors that affect childhood development will allow researches to conduct an “integrated study,” Entwisle said.
“For example, if you look at all of the work that’s been done on poverty in children’s health, it’s rare in that literature to see people also taking into account pollution,” Entwisle added. “And, likewise, if you look at the literature on say, pollution and children’s health, it’s rare to see them take into account poverty. To really understand this, we need to look at all those aspects of the environment simultaneously.”
Although the National Children’s Study requires a long-term commitment from participants, Siega-Riz said she thinks parents will be motivated by an altruistic desire to help the country better understand how to improve children’s health.
Analyses for conditions that occurred during pregnancy or right at the time of birth will be available long before the study is finished, she said.
“We might be able to understand some of the determinants of, for instance, gestational diabetes or pregnancy-induced hypertension,” Siega-Riz said.
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