UCLA will play a key role in a long-term study aimed at identifying causes of and ways to prevent common childhood diseases, officials announced Thursday.
The National Children’s Study will follow about 100,000 children nationwide from birth to age 21 in an attempt to understand how environmental factors can affect children’s health. UCLA’s Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities was selected to host the Los Angeles study center and will partner with other area universities and organizations to collect data on 5,000 local children.
“We’re excited here in Los Angeles and California,” said Dr. Michael Lu, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and one of the study’s lead researchers. “I think this is really important because (of) the effect of environmental influence … This is going to tell us about the causes and prevention of childhood diseases.”
The study will focus primarily on fairly common childhood conditions such as asthma, obesity and birth defects, but Lu said researchers also plan to gather information on rarer diseases.
“The study will be testing hundreds of hypotheses,” he said.
The Los Angeles study center will include children from 56 neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, Lu said. Because they want to follow children from birth to adulthood, researchers will recruit pregnant women and women who hope to become pregnant soon to participate.
Researchers expect to begin collecting data in 2009 and may have preliminary results for the initial years by 2010, according to the study’s Web site.
But funding remains a minor hang-up for the study right now. The full 30-year study is expected to cost over $3 billion, and Congress has not yet authorized that amount. For the moment, Congress will likely continue funding the program on a year-to-year basis, but Lu said he believes once the study is launched the money will come more easily.
“This is really one of the best investments that this nation can be making at this time,” he said.
The National Institutes of Health has already authorized $47.9 million to launch the study in Los Angeles and enroll 5,000 children.
Over the 30 years the study is scheduled to span, researchers plan to periodically gather data on participating children, both by conducting biological tests and interviews. Lu said they will also take soil, water and air samples from each neighborhood in order to gauge how environmental factors affect children’s health.
UCLA will partner with USC, the Los Angeles and Ventura County public health departments, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and a handful of other organizations to complete the study.
Lu said UCLA faculty have been involved with the project since its inception several years ago. Congress first authorized the study in 2000, and since then UCLA researchers have helped design hypotheses and methods.
Lu said he believes the university’s continuing involvement with the study is part of the reason it was chosen as a study center, but he added that Los Angeles County is an ideal place to perform this kind of research.
Investigators want participants to comprise a representative sample of children in the United States, and Lu said the fact that Los Angeles is a very diverse area will make that easier.
“Given the rich diversity we have, I can’t imagine kids from L.A. County not being included (in the study),” he said. “A lot of other study areas do not have as many Asian American and Latino children as we do … it’s an opportunity to study very specific populations.”
Two other University of California schools will be involved in the study as well. UC Irvine will collect data on San Diego and San Bernardino counties, and UC Davis will work with San Mateo and Sacramento counties.
“The University of California is proud to be a significant part of this study of California and our nation’s children. (This) represents a wonderful opportunity for our campuses to play a historic role in understanding some of the most pressing health challenges that face our children. In addition, this kind of multi-campus, multidisciplinary venture is a hallmark of UC excellence,” UC President Robert Dynes said in a statement.
The UC as a whole received over $105 million from the NIH to fund the three campuses participating in the study, with the largest grant designated for UCLA.