Black – Abecedarian study

We have some long-term studies that have had a major impact on our understanding. In the seventies, in North Carolina, a group of early child development specialists from several different disciplines came together and developed a project called the Abecedarian Project. They recruited low-income children from the area and they were randomized into either receiving an early childcare intervention or receiving standard care. 

The early childcare intervention took place for five years. It was an all-day program in a childcare centre where the children received healthy food and a range of activities, play based activities and they received access to primary health care. So the – at age five, then the children went off to school. 

They were followed for a number of years, through their elementary school into middle school into high school, and the children who received the early childcare had better performance on a number of assessments of cognitive development and academic achievement than the children who were in the control group. 

And so we’ve looked at that study as illustrating that very – giving children the care of responding to them and ensuring they’re well-nourished and have adequate health care early in life has a payoff throughout life. 

When the children were 35 and had grown up, there was yet another follow up. And at this follow up they looked at the children’s health status, and lo and behold what they did not expect, they found that the children who had been in the childcare were less likely to have metabolic syndrome, had better blood pressure measures than the children in the control group. Now this is not what they had expected, but this is what they found. 

Not surprising, this study was published in science. They did not have much information about the children’s health throughout life, but they did track the children’s weight and height, and when they looked back this phenomenon was particularly striking among boys. So you saw some of it with girls, but it was stronger in boys. 

When they looked at the boys when they were quite young, what they found is that the weight gain of the boys in the control group kind of spiked during the second year of life so that they gained some excess weight at that time, and the weight gain of the children in the intervention did not. So it looked as though the differences between the groups started, again, very early during those first thousand days. So that study has had a big impact on our understanding of what happens early in life on both development, as well as on health.