Women speak out on risk to landmark Nurses’ Health Study
Federal funding cuts to Harvard have put one of the largest and longest-running studies of women’s health in jeopardy. In a July 1 CNN article, nurses participating in the study spoke out about the impact of this work on public health and in their own lives.
For nearly 50 years, researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and colleagues have collected biological samples and health data from hundreds of thousands of women in the Nurses’ Health Study’s three cohorts. More than 3,800 published scientific articles have used these resources, and their findings have provided important insights on the impact that lifestyle factors including diet, smoking, and exercise have on chronic disease risk.
Biological samples from Nurses’ Health Study participants, along with those collected from men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, and people enrolled as children in the Growing Up Today Study, are kept in freezers that cost thousands of dollars a month to maintain. Researchers are now scrambling to find other sources of funding to keep the samples available for future analyses.
“It’s like burning the Library of Congress—you just can’t get that back,” said Martha Dodds, who joined Nurses’ Health Study II in 1982. Her late mother Dorothy joined the original study cohort in 1976. [Note: CNN found participants through its own outreach on a public Facebook page. No names were released by the study team.]
Dodds said in the article that she and her mother took their study participation seriously. “My one little part may have helped women cut down on alcohol consumption, or maybe it’ll help both men and women exercise more and cut back on trans fats,” she said.
The article noted that all of the nurses who spoke with CNN consider their contribution to advancing public health knowledge to be a lifetime accomplishment.
“And now these hundreds of thousands of hours of work by nearly 300,000 nurses will just be discarded?” Dodds said. “We’re going to take 50 years of research and all this biodata and just destroy it, make it useless?
Read the CNN article: Destroying 50 years of women’s health samples is like ‘burning the Library of Congress’
Learn more
Chan School scrambles to protect living legacy of landmark Nurses’ Health studies (Harvard Gazette)
Pioneering nutrition and chronic disease risk research may soon be lost (Harvard Chan School news)
Long-running Nurses’ Health Study seeking to diversify funding (Harvard Chan School news)
