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Kern chosen for landmark study of children's health
| Friday, Oct 3 2008 6:21 PM
Last Updated: Monday, Oct 6 2008 7:39 AM
Kern County has been chosen to take part in a breakthrough health study that could revolutionize children’s health care.
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And Cal State Bakersfield — receiving a $10.4 million five-year grant, the largest in the school’s history — will spearhead the local research.
“This is a landmark study, which will be the definitive work on factors impacting the growth of children,” said Cal State President Horace Mitchell at Friday’s news conference. “It puts us on another level in terms of the research we’re doing.”
The $3.2 billion National Children’s Study, the largest long-term children’s health study in U.S. history, is being led by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. Researchers will follow 100,000 children nationwide from before birth to age 21.
Kern County is one of 105 locations nationwide to be chosen randomly and one of nine in California.
Locally, 1,000 women who are pregnant or likely to become pregnant will be enrolled by 2011, said Peggy Leapley, co-principal investigator for the project in Kern County. She recently retired from her post as chairwoman of Cal State’s nursing department.
A bonus of being chosen as a focus area is that the study will yield hyper-local data researchers haven’t had before and will shed light on concerns unique to Kern families, she said.
“We’ve never done this kind of study,” Leapley said. “A lot of times, we’re speculating about what causes different things. This will show how factors are associated.”
The enrolled women will be representative of the areas where they live, said Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development.
To ensure correct representation, researchers will study the demographics of the areas and then go door to door in selected neighborhoods, Leapley said.
They want to enroll soon-to-be mothers of all ages, even teens, said Dr. Peter Scheidt, study director.
Over the course of the study, the participants will visit with researchers 13 times, at home and at the study centers like Cal State, Scheidt said.
Researchers hope to gain information about how children’s genes and environments interact, which includes gathering data on air and water quality, nutrition, parenting, safety and health care.
The study will look at conditions like autism, asthma, pre-term birth, obesity and diabetes, and the findings will be released periodically throughout the life of the project, said Dr. Portia Choi, director of maternal, child and adolescent health at the county Public Health Services Department.
Dr. Kip Tulin, a pediatrician with Kaiser Permanente in Bakersfield who is not associated with the study, said that while it will take years for the data to accumulate, “there may be tremendous benefits in how we run our lives.”
“The big question (for physicians) is ‘How is this going to affect what I have to do?’ We’re all strapped for time,” he said. “But as far as it being an incursion, I have no problems.”
The study should not create an undue burden on participants or doctors, said Asa Bradman, who will help lead the Kern portion from UC Berkeley’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health Research.
Besides the data, another boon from the study is the opportunity it provides for Cal State faculty and students to work with collaborators at Berkeley, UC Irvine and the University of Chicago, Mitchell said.
Those connections may lead to other large research opportunities, he added.
“We are now in a ballpark where we really get noticed,” Mitchell said. “This is a landmark day.”