Children's Environmental Health
Background
Congress authorized the planning and implementation of the National Children’s Study through the Children’s Health Act of 2000, Public Law 106-310 Sec. 1004.
The Act authorized the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and a consortium of federal agencies to conduct the National Children’s Study. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) joined the NICHD to plan and conduct the study.
The National Children’s Study will examine the effects of environmental influences on the health and development of more than 100,000 children across the United States, following them from before birth until age 21. The goal of the study is to improve the health and well being of children. The study defines “environment” broadly and will take a number of issues
into account, including:
Researchers will analyze how these elements interact with each other and what helpful and/or harmful effects they might have on children’s health and development. By studying children through their different phases of growth and development, researchers will be better able to understand the role of these factors on health and disease. Findings from the study will be made available as soon as possible as the research progresses. The study will also allow scientists to find the differences that exist between groups of people, in terms of their health, health care access, disease occurrence, and other issues, so that these differences or disparities can be addressed.
The National Children’s Study will be one of the richest information resources available for answering questions related to children’s health and development and will form the basis of child health guidance, interventions, and policy for generations to come. It is anticipated that the preliminary results from the first years of the study will be available in 2008-2009.
The National Children’s Study will form the basis of child health guidance, interventions, and policy or generations to come.
The National Children’s Study will examine many aspects of children’s lives, from family genetics; to the constructed world of neighborhoods and schools; to chemical exposures linked to the atmosphere, food or water supplies; to the social and behavioral environment in which the children grow and develop. The ability to examine multiple exposures and link them in cause-effect relationships with multiple outcomes is the defining characteristic of the National Children’s Study, and the focus of the Study Plan.
The National Children’s Study will observe 100,000 children from before birth to their twenty-first birthdays. Initially, participants will include three distinct groups: pregnant women and their partners, couples planning pregnancy, and women who are of childbearing age but are not planning a pregnancy.
The National Children’s Study will be the first effort to capture exposures prior to and early in pregnancy, and to then track so many participants for more than 20 years. Other studies have looked at prenatal exposures, but they either started in the first trimester of pregnancy, or stopped tracking at birth.
The Study Plan focuses on several priority health themes: outcomes of pregnancy, child growth and development, injury, asthma, and psychological and emotional health. The Plan outlines the measures of exposures and the schedule of data collection for the first few years of the Study.
In developing the Study Plan, the National Children’s Study relied on the expertise and input from the National Children’s Study Federal Advisory Committee; its working groups of experienced obstetric, pediatric and environmental health researchers representing federal agencies, the private sector, child health and environmental advocacy groups; and others.
Children’s Health Act of 2000 authorized the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and a consortium of federal agencies to conduct the National Children’s Study including:
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The NICHD and NIEHS are both part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the biomedical research arm of the federal government.
Both the CDC and the NIH fall under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the principal federal agency for protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who are least able to help themselves.
The EPA is the arm of the federal government that protects human health and safeguards the natural environment — air, water, and land — upon which life depends.
These four agencies, NICHD, NIEHS, CDC, and EPA, are dedicated to working together to improve the health of our nation’s children through the successful completion of the National Children’s Study.
In 2005, the first 7 Vanguard Centers for the Study, as well as the Coordinating Center were selected. These centers include:
March 29, 2006
Powerpoint Presentation, "Salt Lake County in the National Children's Study" by Dr. Ed Clark
Powerpoint Presentation, "Environmental Measures and Exposures – an Overview" by Dr. Rod Larson and Jim Quackenboss
Environmental Council of the States (ECOS) Resolution Number 06-6:
National Children's Study Web Site: http://www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov/
