The National Children's Study project is being run by the National Institutes of Health, and is designed to eventually improve the health of American kids.
Researchers will study six specific conditions by tracking the lives of children from pre-birth to 21-years-old. They hope to determine whether environment influences the health and development of children.
To do that, they are seeking pregnant or soon-to-be pregnant women who can be tracked, and who live in certain demographic areas of Cuyahoga and Lorain Counties; the only Ohio locations of 105 sites that will be studied nationwide.
Locally, the CASE Western Reserve University School of Medicine is receiving $26 million in federal money to oversee the program. 50 workers have been hired to administer the effort, and they started seeking potential participants this week.
Doctor Dorr Dearborn is the chairman of the Department of Environmental Services at the CASE School of Medicine. He spoke to us from California - where he is working with the leadership of centers from around the country as the project gets underway.
Dr Dearborn says Greater Cleveland will benefit being chosen, and he adds that studying children here could help explain things such as low birth weights, diabetes, and other anomalies.
DR. DORR DEARBORN:
"It allows us to collect data on Cleveland infants and children, on our own population. If there are things that are unique about Cleveland in terms of environmental exposures, then that has a chance of showing up."
Doctor Dearborn says area hospitals and obstetric professionals are taking part in the work, which will follow 100,000 children nationally, the largest, long-term study of children's health ever conducted in the United States.
