Health

By COSHANDRA DILLARD
Staff Writer

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler, in partnership with The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, has been chosen to conduct a monumental study in East Texas. The National Children's Study is the largest of its kind, with a recruitment of 100,000 children from across the country who will be followed before birth to age 21.

UTHSCT's Dr. Debra Cherry is spearheading the study in Lamar County, where 1,000 children will be selected over a period of time.

Dr. Cherry is an occupational and environmental medicine physician and has been at UTHSCT for 10 years. She and Dr. George Lister, principle investigator and chair of pediatrics of UT Southwestern, will lead the North Texas Children's Study Coalition. Other partners are The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health and Batelle Memorial Institute.

The total cost of the national study will reach $3.2 billion and about $1.8 million will be used to fund the study in Lamar County over five years. Lamar County was selected because of its diverse cross section of the population and rural environment.

"I am so excited that Lamar County will be represented in the national child study sample," Dr. Cherry said. "Since Lamar County will be included we will know that the findings of this study will be applicable to the people that live in East Texas."

Dr. Cherry said there will be a "dream team" involved in the study including neonatologists, obstetricians, public health scientists and more.

It will be a part of the second wave of the national study and is expected to begin in 2011. Until then, Dr. Cherry said, an advisory board will be formed to lay the groundwork of the study and develop relationships with health care providers and the community.

"It is monumental," she said. "It will allow us to uncover the roots of childhood diseases that we could not address with any other kind of study."

Officials with NCS and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development announced Friday there will be 27 centers funded in the project and spoke of its plans to observe the development of illnesses in children.

When it is fully operational, the study is expected to have approximately 40 study centers recruiting volunteers from the planned 105 study locations throughout the U.S.

"There is no other American study quite like it," NIC director Dr. Duane Alexander said during a teleconference.

"We look to it to provide new information that will help treat and perhaps even prevent any of a range of adult conditions that have roots in childhood."

Dr. Alexander said findings from the study will result in a significant savings in the nation's health care costs.

"Estimating conservatively, if what we learn from the National Children's Study results in only a 1 percent reduction in the cost of these conditions, our nation will save about $7.58 billion a year," he said. "That one-year savings is more than double the entire $3.2 billion the National Children's Study is expected to have cost when the children who participate reach 21 years of age."

The study will recruit women before they give birth and, in some cases, before they even conceive, Dr. Alexander said. He said the study will review the mothers' environmental exposures and there is no age restriction.

Planning for the study began in 2000 as officials analyzed and developed ways to gather participants for the study.

NCS director Dr. Peter Scheidt said one of the main focuses of the study is preterm births. According to the surgeon general, nearly 500,000 American babies, or 12 percent, are born premature every year.

Although a sizeable number of those babies do well due to adv-ances in research and health care, many are still at risk for serious conditions, some of which could be lifelong, including cerebral palsy, mental retardation and learning disabilities, Dr. Scheidt said.

"Low birth weight infants who reach adulthood are at increased risk for obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes -- conditions which all reduce the quality of life, contribute to health care costs and rob many people of productive years of life."

Authorized by Congress, the National Children's Study is being conducted by a consortium of federal agencies: the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, both part of the National Institutes of Health; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.