Golisano Children’s Hospital’s lead pediatrician agrees with the National Institutes of Health for their decision to cancel a long term study.
This National Institutes of Health recently announced a decision to pull funding from the National Children’s Study—even after spending more than a billion dollars over 10 years of the project.
Nina Schor is the Pediatrician-in-Chief at Golisano Children’s Hospital. She says the NIH had to make a cost benefit analysis and decided the project would not give enough useful results to justify continued funding.
"This was an exercise in gathering information without knowing ahead of time what the question was going to be. And so, it had the enormous potential to gather data that wasn't relevant to the question that ultimately being asked."
The ambitious study set out to follow 100 thousand children from before birth to age 21.
"The information that they hoped to get from it was the relationship between environment situations and exposures and subsequent health."
The NIH plans smaller studies to examine the links between environment and health in 2015.