An ambitious study to collect data about British babies and follow them through their lives has been abandoned less than a year after it was launched.
It was hoped more than 16,000 prospective mothers would be recruited for the project, called Life Study. But by September, only 249 women had agreed to take part. As a result, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which oversaw the study, announced last week it would close. The project, which was also backed by the Medical Research Council, had already consumed more than £9m. “We had hoped to use Life Study to find out why some people – including those from ethnic minorities – are more susceptible to environmental factors than others,” Jane Elliott, the ESRC’s chief executive, told the Observer. “However, we could not recruit the numbers of prospective mothers we needed and so we had no alternative but to call a halt to the project.”
The closure of Life Study follows a move by the US National Institutes of Health in December, to axe a similar project, called the National Children’s Study, which had received $1.2bn and also had problems recruiting participants. The UK Life Study had been given a particular remit to include a substantial proportion of families from ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups. These individuals have been particularly hard to recruit in similar, earlier studies. However, the problems in involving prospective mothers from these groups proved too difficult for the organisers of Life Study and recruitment lagged badly behind expected figures.
The failure of both the British and US projects raises questions about the future of such longitudinal studies that, in the past, have made significant findings and are prized by medical researchers and social scientists. As the journal Nature noted last week: “These studies reveal associations between factors early in life, such as poverty or a mother’s diet in pregnancy, and outcomes later on, ranging from diseases to cognition and earnings.” But response rates to requests to participate in such studies now appear to be declining, possibly as more and more demands are made on people’s attention in everyday. “It is an issue we will have to think about in future,” added Elliott.
