Sparling – follow-up

There were 111 children in the original Abecedarian project. By the way, there have been a series of randomized studies, actually 15 different randomized samples since the first one. But the first 111 children, about fifty something in each group, were randomized at birth and we did our intervention throughout the first five years of life, and then we continued to measure after that. For example, after measuring across five years of life, we measured at age eight and then at age 15, and then at 21, and now we’ve measured at age 30, those results have just been published, and lo and behold this coming summer, the summer of 2012, our first child will reach 40, so we are now planning the age 40 follow up, and there have been over 200 journal articles and juried journals published on this group of, these children in the original group and the other groups that followed it.  

I should say, too, that we’re still following about 95 per cent of that original group at age 30. That is really a remarkable retention rate and we’ve worked really hard at that, but we’ve also been very lucky in doing that