Sparling – health findings

One of the unexpected findings of the Abecedarian program is that when we measured at age 21, there were a variety of health outcomes. Children were healthier, they were less likely, oh, no, they weren’t children anymore, they were young adults. They were less likely to have symptoms of depression.  

They were more likely to have a healthy diet and a healthy lifestyle. They were less likely to use drugs and they had less risky behaviours. Now that was not something that we targeted, but I think what it shows is that if your life is going better in general, if you’re succeeding in school, if you manage to go to university or a substantial proportion goes to university, then the odds of your taking care of your health, of having better health outcomes just increase. It was kind of an indirect effect and we’re rather intrigued by that. When we study at age 40, we’re going to look especially to further health effects because many of the groups we’ve studied have predicted poor health outcomes as they age, and so we think that may not be so true for this group.  

There has been one economic analysis happen of the Abecedarian program and it basically shows that for every, when we measure at about age 21, for every dollar spent there’s about a four dollar return to society, and that, by the way, is largely from the educational effect. We haven’t even begun to get the health effects of that so when we go further out to older ages, it’s very likely that those numbers will go up in terms of the return on your investment.