Grant: Foundation Grant

Advanced Technologies; Early Intervention; Economic Analysis; Mental Health; Pregnancy & Early Childhood Cohort; Prevention; Risk Prediction Tools; School Achievement

<html> <body> <p>Canada is failing its children. One in four are overweight or obese, mental health disorders have increased by 15% and 27% of preschool children are not developmentally ready to start school. These problems result in diminished health, wellbeing, educational achievement and lifetime success.<br> <br>Research across many disciplines has demonstrated that early interventions are badly needed to optimize physical, mental and educational outcomes. Yet there are major gaps in our understanding of <u>who</u> (which children), <u>when</u> (at which point in early life), and <u>how</u> (what interventions) to intervene.<br> <br>To address these questions we created the largest primary care research network for children in Canada called The Applied Research Group for Kids - <em>TARGet Kids!</em> (www.targetkids.ca). TARGet Kids! has harnessed the power of Ontario&rsquo;s publicly funded primary healthcare (PHC) system to collect data on 6000 children in the first 5 years of life, creating Canada&rsquo;s largest early childhood longitudinal cohort. Over the past 5 years <i>TARGet Kids!</i> has received 18 grants totaling over $5 million, produced 20 high impact publications, brought global media attention to pressing child health issues and changed children&rsquo;s primary healthcare (PHC) practice.<br>&nbsp;<br>We aim to leverage the success of <i>TARGet Kids!</i> to optimize the health and development of Canada&rsquo;s children by targeting the three outcomes of early life that have the greatest long-term impact on health and wellbeing: 1) Cardiometabolic health; 2) Mental health; and 3) School readiness. Our approach is driven by new data showing that these three outcomes share common early origins such that interventions aimed at one outcome will have positive effects on all three, thus markedly increasing the efficiency, feasibility and impact of this proposal. Using an integrated knowledge-to-action approach our objectives are:<br> <br>1) Expand the <i>TARGet Kids!</i> network in breadth, depth and diversity to follow the health and development of 12,000 Ontario children from pregnancy through the first 5 years of life, creating one of the largest and most comprehensive early childhood cohorts in the world.<br>2) Use <i>TARGet Kids!</i> powerful longitudinal data to understand the trajectories to cardiometabolic health, mental health and school readiness to identify early modifiable factors as targets for PHC interventions.<br>3) Develop state-of-the-art clinical risk prediction tools to arm Canada&rsquo;s PHC providers with the ability to predict cardiometabolic health, mental health and school readiness outcomes early in life before negative outcomes develop to identify which children will maximally benefit from early interventions.<br>4) Leverage <i>TARGet Kids!</i> practice based infrastructure to test, through cohort embedded randomized controlled trials (RCTs), promising PHC interventions to optimize the cardiometabolic health, mental health and school readiness of Canada&rsquo;s children.<br> <br>Our novel trans-disciplinary plan capitalizes on the scientific expertise of a world class team with expertise in childhood cardiometabolic health, mental health, school readiness, health equity, economics, clinical trials, risk prediction modeling and knowledge translation. The breadth, depth and productivity of this program will place Canada at the forefront of early childhood prevention research. The payoff will be physically and mentally healthier children with optimal school performance resulting in lower health and social services expenditures and a healthier society.<strong> <br> </strong> <br clear="all"> </p> </body> </html>