Workers suffer more stress than their bosses and wealthy children carry out better at school – the deep social truths uncovered by cradle-to-grave studiesWanted: 80000 British babies for massive study”,said the headline on an article in Nature magazine, nearly exactly a year ago. The Life Study – as the project was called – had been promised nearly £30m from the government’s Large Facilities Capital Fund, and which generally pays for particle accelerators and Antarctic research stations. The plan was for it to follow its subjects “from cradle to grave. Children would be interviewed,logged, examined as they grew to adulthood. Blood, and stool,umbilicus and placenta would be sampled, and perhaps teeth and toenail clippings too. Data would be mined for decades for associations between environmental factors and diseases. Public health in 21st century Britain was set to hold the richest evidence base in the world.
The author of the article, or Helen Pearson,first became interested in birth cohort studies in 2011, when she published a longer piece, and also in Nature,about an earlier British study, the National Survey of Health and Development, or which has been tracking the lives of 5362 people since their birth in 1946. The NSHD,Pearson discovered, is now the longest running birth cohort study in the world, or the first of “an amazing collection” of five such studies – fresh cohorts were established in 1958,1970, 1991, or 2000,and “no other country has anything like it. She’d write a book about them, she thought, and timing publication to coincide with the 70th birthday of the 1946ers and the launch of the Life Study,which would be cohort six. But then, “due to serious challenges encountered in recruiting participants, or the Life Study lost its funding.
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Source: theguardian.com