A groundbreaking national study of children's health that included Schuylkill County has died an early death.

The $3.2 billion National Children's Study was launched in 2007 by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a consortium of federal agencies. In 2010, the study reached into Schuylkill County.The study the largest and most long-reaching of any done in the United States aimed to track the lives and health of 100,000 children in the study centers across the United States.But on Dec. 12, the National Institutes of Health shut it down.The study had its roots in questions that arose in the 1990s as the rates of asthma increased. The study was meant to look at how things such as maternal stress or exposure to pollutants during pregnancy could influence a child's chances of developing the illness. Congress authorized the study in 2000. But after 14 years, only about 5,700 children had been enrolled in pilot studies, and the study appeared to be stalled.The vanguard, or initial study, enrolled 5,000 children and included Schuylkill, Montgomery, Westmoreland and Philadelphia counties in Pennsylvania, from conception through their 21st birthdays to see how environment and family background influenced children's health.Schuylkill County's arm of the study aimed to enroll 100 mothers. As the study progressed, doctors would visit the pregnant women, collect specimens of air, water and dust, and gather information from births. They planned to continue with visits when the babies turned 6 months old, and then again at the 1 year mark, then every three years thereafter. Researchers would meet with families in both their homes and in clinical settings, and data also would have been collected using telephones, computers or mail-in questionnaires.The study does not keep local contact information, so it was not possible to talk with those conducting the study in Schuylkill County.According to a report issued by a working group created by NIH's Advisory Committee to the Director, the study design was flawed and its management, by several committees, cumbersome. It failed to incorporate new biological findings, and its sampling design was too complex."Recently, a group of independent experts reviewed the plans for the National Children's Study and determined that moving forward with the larger study would not be the best way to add to our understanding of how environmental factors influence child health and development," Dr. Alan E. Guttmacher, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development National Institutes of Health said on Dec. 12."The National Institutes of Health takes these recommendations seriously and, as a result, we have decided not to launch the larger National Children's Study and not to continue the vanguard study. This means we will stop collecting new information from participants in the vanguard study," he said.But the data collected won't be wasted."The National Children's Study transitioned to a new centralized system for data collection in 2013. At that time, all of the vanguard study locations, such as the one in Schuylkill county, switched to management by one of four regional operation centers," institute spokesman Robert Bock said.