Growing Up Today Study

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The Growing Up Today Study (GUTS) is an ongoing collaborative research project between researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Established in 1996 in the United States, the study collects data annually from over 26,000 participants in order to evaluate the factors that influence weight change and health throughout the life cycle. The participants are children (females and males) of the women who enrolled as participants in the second cohort of the Nurses' Health Study. Established in 1976, the Nurses' Health Study has collected data from 238,000 nurse participants, making it one of the largest and longest running investigations of factors that influence women’s health and risk for disease. Combined, the Growing Up Today Study and the Nurses’ Health Study can be considered a cross-generational super-study, leading to new insights and landmark findings in the field of public health research.

Contents

Early Beginnings to Present

In 1996, at the start of the study, 16,882 children between the ages of 9 and 14 years old were enrolled in GUTS I. Eight years later, in 2004, the study expanded and a second cohort of 10,920 children between the ages of 10 and 17 were enrolled in GUTS II. Initially, the two separate cohorts were surveyed separately and biannually. Starting in 2013, the two cohorts joined as one (GUTS I & GUTS II), and are now surveyed annually. The participants are now all young adults, many of whom are starting families of their own — which could eventually lead to the possibility of a third generation of study participants and data collection.

Today, the Growing Up Today Study team includes doctors, researchers, and statisticians throughout the United States, and GUTS data is used by researchers across the globe. Major research topics include:

Nearly 100 research articles about health outcomes throughout a lifetime – from pregnancy and fertility to heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes—have been published as a result of their work and the continuous contributions of GUTS participants.

Selected findings

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