From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 9, 2006

Key National Study of Children's Health Would Be Canceled Under Bush's
NIH Budget for 2007

By JEFFREY BRAINARD




Washington

A major long-term study of children's health and diseases, set to begin
in 2007, would instead be canceled under the budget President Bush
released this week. Advocates for the research vowed to ask Congress to
ignore the president's proposal and to finance the National Children's
Study, which was to have involved up to 40 academic medical centers.

Under Mr. Bush's proposal, the project would be a victim of plans for no
budget increase next year at the National Institutes of Health (The
Chronicle, February 7), which was to have provided most of the funds for
the study. Its hefty price tag -- about $70-million in 2007 and
$2.7-billion over two decades -- was the key factor in the proposal to
cancel.

The National Children's Study would be the largest of its kind, tracking
100,000 children from birth to adulthood. The longitudinal study would
follow the same individuals over time to identify the causes, like diet
and environmental pollution, of a variety of childhood illnesses and
conditions, including asthma, autism, diabetes, learning disorders,
obesity, and premature birth.

In size and duration, the project would be similar to other longitudinal
studies that have yielded important insights into health and medical
treatments. Among those are the NIH-financed Framingham Heart Study and
the Women's Health Initiative.

"We think the parents and grandparents of American children will make it
clear, and congressmen and -women will understand, the critical nature
of the National Children's Study," said Alan R. Fleischman, chairman of
the study's advisory committee and a professor of pediatrics at Yeshiva
University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York. He called
the proposed cancellation "an egregious wrong" and said that "the future
health of adults is based on the health of children."

The NIH has spent $50-million on planning for the National Children's
Study, which Congress authorized in 2000, and participating researchers
were preparing to begin enrolling children as study participants in
2007. "If you think of gestation, we're in labor -- we're ready," Dr.
Fleischman said.

The planning grants included 14 academic institutions: Columbia, Drexel,
Duke, and Marquette Universities; the Medical College of Wisconsin; the
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York; South Dakota State
University; the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; and
the Universities of California at Irvine, North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Cincinnati, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wisconsin at Madison.

Each institution was paired with a nearby county determined to have
populations of children from which a nationally representative sample
could be drawn. The institutions had already publicly announced the
research program, Dr. Fleischman said.

A cancellation would negate the efforts of 2,500 scientists, most of
them in academe, who participated in a multiyear process to map out the
study's research objectives, he said. That degree of collaboration is
novel among large longitudinal studies, he added.

Since 2000, Congress has repeatedly voiced support for the study in
legislative language but has not specifically designated money for it.

The NIH's director, Elias A. Zerhouni, said this week that the
administration had had to make tough choices to control the federal
budget deficit. At a news conference on Wednesday, he said that
"eventually we will need to consider" projects like the National
Children's Study. "We are very committed to children's health."

If the National Children's Study does go forward some day, Dr. Zerhouni
said, it could benefit from a separate effort, which he and other
officials announced on Wednesday, to study how genes and the environment
interact to cause disease. (See accompanying article.) The new effort,
which is not focused on children, will examine DNA that researchers have
already collected from patients and thus may yield results more quickly
than a would a national study of children over many years, he suggested.

However, Dr. Zerhouni added, the administration did not propose
canceling the children's study in order to free up the $40-million
slated for the new effort, which the administration highlighted in its
budget proposal. "I would like to dispel the notion," he said, "that
this was one against the other."
Full Text on NIH Here->< http://.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2006/nhgri08.htm>