The National Institutes of Health recently awarded a $28 million grant as a program project that will enable Add Health to follow the original adolescent cohort into their 30s with a fifth interview wave. The new funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) will support a fifth wave of data collection, analysis, and dissemination. This five-year project is planned to begin in 2016 when the Add Health participants will be ages 31-42.
In addition to collecting a new round of social and biological data, this fifth wave will also gather information on respondents’ birth and childhood circumstances including the collection of birth records data for a subset of respondents. Together with existing Add Health data collected over 20 years the scientific community will be able to investigate an invaluable 40-year longitudinal record of the Add Health cohort from birth through the fourth decade of life. These data will be shared with the multi-disciplinary community of researchers to test hypotheses about the causes of chronic disease and inform public health policies for reducing chronic disease prevalence, disparities, and costs in America.
To reflect this study’s ongoing, real time life view that follows individuals from early adolescence into adulthood, Add Health has been renamed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Beginning in childhood and following the cohort into adulthood represents a major investment by NICHD to understand how social, behavioral, and biological linkages in early life shape the developmental and health pathways into adulthood; NICHD will realize the payoff for its investment with the new data in Wave V of Add Health when scientific discovery of the social, behavioral, and biological processes that lead to health and disease risks will be identified and interventions can be developed to reduce these risks in early life.
Click here for more information on Wave V
UNC News release issued September 25, 2014
Wave V News release also posted to the Carolina Population Center website