Washington

All together now: a proposed children's study will look at how biology and the environment interact. Credit: A. SKELLEY/CORBIS

The architects of a study that would follow 100,000 American children from conception to adulthood have unveiled their plans after four years of preparation.

The designers of the National Children's Study, which would cost $2.7 billion to run, hope to collect a wealth of information. Sources will range from blood taken from mothers before pregnancy to samples of the dirt found in children's homes, schools and playgrounds. The study blueprint, released on 16 November, also calls for information to be collected on the children's genes, chemicals in their bodies and the structure of their families.

The data will shed light on the broad issue of how biology and the environment interact to cause diseases and developmental disorders. But the study team, which is based at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Rockville, Maryland, is particularly interested in areas such as obesity, mental disorders and issues involving pregnancy, including birth weight and birth defects.

“There's a lot of hope pinned on this,” says study adviser Nancy Green, medical director of the March of Dimes in White Plains, New York, which lobbies on health issues in babies. Green says the study could be as crucial as the famous Framingham Heart Study, which has followed residents of a town in Massachusetts since 1948 and is credited with having revolutionized the treatment of cardiovascular disease.

The study could also get to the roots of rare disorders, such as types of childhood cancer, by sharing data with similar efforts in other countries. Investigators in Scandinavia, for example, this year began collecting biological samples and data on 200,000 Danish and Norwegian children, although they are not directly sampling the children's environment.

The child health institute, which was given $50 million of government funding in 2000 to plan the study, now needs to persuade Congress to fund the project. It has the backing of a diverse group of 48 organizations, including paediatric health groups and the industry-funded American Chemistry Council, which announced its support in a letter to the institute on 12 November. “The cost of the study is dwarfed by the cost of treating the diseases and conditions it can be expected to address,” the letter states.

The March of Dimes director of public policy and government affairs, Jo Merrill, hopes that such arguments will convince Congress to support the child study, even though spending on domestic programmes has been drastically curtailed because of the US war on terrorism. “We're cautiously optimistic,” she says.