Seeking information about a host of childhood maladies, researchers plan to closely follow a couple of thousand Chicago-area children from womb to drinking age as part of a massive national study.
The Chicago portion of the study was launched today with a call for volunteers.
Researchers are looking for help from 2,000 women who are pregnant or who expect to become pregnant and are willing to have their children scrutinized until they turn 21. Researchers will examine everything from what the kids eat and drink to the soil around their homes and the air they breathe.
That data will feed into the National Children's Study, which will eventually monitor 100,000 children across the United States. Cook County was one of 105 geographic areas chosen for the study.
"The goal of the study is to get at some of the underlying causes of many childhood conditions," such as asthma, obesity and diabetes, said Dr. Jane Holl, a pediatrician and lead researcher for the undertaking's Greater Chicago Study Center.
Seeking to include a wide range of races, ethnicities and socioeconomic conditions, the study will focus on 15 Chicago neighborhoods and Cook County suburbs: South Lawndale, Hyde Park, Rogers Park, Englewood, West Loop, Irving Park, Cicero, Country Club Hills, Hillside, Norridge, Schaumburg, Northbrook, Harvey, Alsip and Prospect Heights.
"Chicago will allow us to learn about many circumstances and many situations in which children are raised and which women experience their pregnancies," said Steven Hirschfeld, acting director of the national study.
The knowledge gleaned from the study, which Holl said is the "largest and longest study of women and children to be conducted in the United States," will also have an impact on adults.
"If we can prevent (these diseases) in childhood, clearly we would have a healthier adult population," Holl said.
She said the local study is expected to expand next year to include 1,000 families from both DuPage and Will counties.
The national effort was authorized by Congress as part of the Children's Health Act of 2000. Work has begun in seven locations and 30 more studies, including the one in the Chicago area, are launching.
The large number of questions the study will attempt to address could lead to analytical issues, said statistician S. Stanley Young, assistant director of bioinformatics at the National Institute for Statistical Sciences.
"Unless there's extreme care in how the analysis is done, we could get more false signals than real signals," said Young, who lectures on the analyses of complex data sets.
Holl, who said the first seven years for local research is funded by $32 million from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said volunteers are vital to better health.
"The families that are willing to participate in the study will be making a very big contribution to advancing knowledge and science around child health and potentially around adult health," she said.
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