Longitudinal thinking
One of the most ambitious US research projects everâ€"the National Children's Study on the effects of environmental influences on child healthâ€"will fully launch in the next 12 months. Although the project has been dogged by administrative missteps, wrangles over study design and poor allocation of budgetary resources, it promises to transform knowledge of how prenatal factors and early childhood experiences play a role in disease development in later life. It will also be an important testing ground for the potential of large-scale, multi-year epidemiological studies to facilitate elucidation of the role of hereditary, dietary, lifestyle and environmental factors in complex disease. Indeed, with the increasing availability of high-throughput technologies for monitoring many different types of omics data and the integration of information systems for sharing and accessing these with related health data, there has never been a better time to embark ...