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The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is the Government of Canada's agency for health research. Through CIHR, the Government of Canada invested approximately $49.8 million in 2004-05 in research on child health across Canada.
Asthma rates among children are skyrocketing, leaving health researchers, health practitioners and parents wondering why this is the case. Many suspect genes, many suspect the environment - and the most likely answer lies in a complex interaction between the two. But how this happens - and why it's happening more and more - remains a mystery.
The Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health wants to uncover at least part of the answer. Through its initiative on Indoor Air Exposure, Genes and Gene-Environment Interactions in the Etiology of Asthma and Allergy in Early Childhood, it will support a cohort study of large numbers of children that will begin early in pregnancy, if not before. The study will examine the impact of indoor air quality in homes and day care facilities, other environmental exposures such as diet, infection and outdoor air pollutants, and their interaction with genetic susceptibility and protective factors. The study, which involves numerous partners inside and outside CIHR, could lead to the development of new prevention methods and new guidelines for housing construction and heating and ventilation systems in houses and day care facilities.
Dr. Peter Rosenbaum: Answering questions for concerned parents
Dr. Peter Rosenbaum is often asked by parents of children with cerebral palsy whether their children will ever walk.
Frustrated by his inability to answer them, he and his colleagues developed the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS). This five-level motor function research program, which assesses the likelihood that children with cerebral palsy will walk, is used by therapists and doctors in more than 20 countries around the world.
Dr. Rosenbaum holds a Canada Research Chair in Childhood Disability and is Professor of Pediatrics at McMaster University and Associate member of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He co-founded the CanChild Centre for Childhood Disability. CanChild focuses on children and youth with physical, developmental, and/or communicative needs who require rehabilitation services, as well as their families. It brings a wide variety of research perspectives to bear on childhood disability - everyone from occupational therapists to developmental psychologists to orthopedic surgeons.
"These people understand the nature of children," he says.
Consistent funding from CIHR and other sources has helped CanChild establish a multidisciplinary team that takes a leading role in identifying emerging issues for research, practice, policy and education. The team also focuses on transferring the knowledge that they create into effective action at the clinical and health systems level, and provides education materials for consumers, service providers, policy makers and students.
From its base at McMaster, CanChild is building a network of like-minded researchers across Canada (McGill University and the Universities of Alberta and British Columbia) and internationally (the Netherlands, England, Australia and Slovenia). This network allows researchers to build on each others' work to improve the health and wellbeing of children with disabilities and their families, help shape public policy to better serve these children and families and train the next generation of childhood disability researchers.
The CIHR Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health, under the leadership of Scientific Director Dr. Michael Kramer, is helping to "build the life foundation" through multidisciplinary research in areas of strategic importance in reproductive and child health. So far, the Institute has initiated requests for applications (RFAs) in the following areas: pre- and post-implantation health; fetal growth and pre-term birth; healthy developmental trajectories of children and youth; and ethics research relating to longitudinal studies of pregnant women and children. In addition, it has partnered with other Institutes and agencies to support RFAs on child obesity, maternal and child health disparities, palliative care, tobacco use and addiction and the genetics of autism.
The Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health works in close partnership with many different organizations whose commitment to ensuring the best start for children in life includes an understanding of the importance of research. Among them are the Sick Kids Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (USA), the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network and the National Alliance for Autism Research (USA).
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research is the Government of Canada's agency for health research. Its objective is to excel, according to internationally accepted standards of scientific excellence, in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians, more effective health services and products and a strengthened Canadian health care system. Composed of 13 Institutes, CIHR provides leadership and support to close to 10,000 researchers and trainees in every province of Canada.
