The National Children’s Study, the largest nationwide study of the effects of genes and the environment on children’s health, will follow 100,000 children from before birth to age 21 to identify genetic and environmental factors that contribute to health disorders and conditions of childhood and adulthood. The study proposes to recruit a diverse sample of more than 100,000 subjects nationwide and to study the environmental influences that affect them, including toxins, nutrition, physical living conditions and socioeconomic factors.

The study aims to discover the incipient causes of topical health issues including autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, asthma, birth defects, diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Six of the several conditions that will be studied – obesity, injury, asthma, diabetes, schizophrenia and autism – cost the U.S. system $758 billion a year, said Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, during a Friday conference call with reporters. That is why the ultimate goal is to find ways to lower the cost of health care. NIH officials said they hope that in the long term the findings of the study will result in a significant savings in the nation’s health care costs.

On Friday, the National Institutes of Health announced the 27 research locations for the next phase of the study. The National Children’s Study will be conducted at 105 different locations throughout the United States and it will cost an estimated $3.2 billion. The next phase of the study will begin in January when the University of North Carolina and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York will start recruit pregnant women whose babies would then be followed to age 21.

Authorized by Congress in 2000, the National Children’s Study is being conducted by a consortium of federal agencies: the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, both part of the National Institutes of Health; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The preliminary findings will be available in 2012.