KINGSTON – A University of Rhode Island nursing professor has been awarded a $2.4 million federal grant to continue a study that has been tracking 213 children who were born prematurely from 1985 to 1989, following them from infancy all the way into young adulthood.
The five-year grant comes from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Nursing Research. Researcher Mary Sullivan’s project, URI said in a news release, is the only such long-term study of its kind in the United States.
Sullivan is looking at the impact of prematurity, medical history and environments on achievement and concerns through young adulthood. The goal is to help professionals better identify risk factors and pinpoint the timing and content of interventions needed.
The study tracks participants’ blood chemistry, pulmonary function, cardiopulmonary response to exercise and metabolic functioning, and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis function by salivary cortisol.
Results of Sullivan’s work are also expected to help parents of premature infants understand the challenges that lie ahead for their children.
More than 500,000 infants are born prematurely every year, and 50 to 70 percent will require a range of specialized services. In 2005, costs associated with preterm births in the United States are estimated to have been at least $2.2 billion.
The subjects in Sullivan’s study, now all teenagers, were all born at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence. Sullivan got involved in an earlier study involving them, in 1990, while earning her doctorate, and now she will follow the group until age 23.
“This unique group has allowed us to see and describe over time the challenges faced and how they were resolved,” she said in the release. “Ultimately, this may provide guidance to parents of other premature infants and inform professionals such as the physicians, nurses, physical and occupational therapists providing care.”
In addition to her role as a professor of nursing at URI, Sullivan is a research scientist at Women & Infants and an adjunct professor of pediatrics at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. At URI, she is director of graduate studies in nursing and teaches courses in research methods and concept development.
The prematurity study also involves researchers at the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Women & Infants, the Rhode Island Hospital Pediatric Heart Center, and the University of Chicago.
For more information about the URI College of Nursing, go to www.uri.edu/nursing. To learn more about Women & Infants Hospital, go to www.womenandinfants.org.
