A Note from the Principal
Investigator
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Matthew W. Gillman, MD
Good news—Project Viva has received another large grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This grant goes through 2016 and allows us to begin our “Early Teen” visit—some Project Viva kids are 12 years old already! It is because of the continued participation of all our moms and kids that we successfully secure funding from the NIH. All of us at Project Viva cannot thank our participants enough for staying with us year after year.
Our last visit was at Age 7. We visited over 1100 Viva kids to obtain information about growth, asthma and allergies, behavior, and many other issues. We are already doing analyses on these data and as we’ve done before we are finding many new discoveries that help in prevention of obesity, asthma, and other common childhood conditions.
Project Viva now has a national and international reputation, and the results of the study have contributed to many new policies, for example, in the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity.
To our participants:
We hope that you and your child find our staff professional, customer service focused, and fun. We want Viva kids to be engaged at the visits and to feel special since they are a part of Project Viva. We welcome your ideas as to how to make the visits as enjoyable as possible.
One other reminder - in the "between" years, when we are not seeing you and your child in person, we ask you to fill out questionnaires that we mail to you (or email so you can do them online). So if your child is 10 or 11, please look for these surveys, fill them out, and mail them back if you haven’t done so already. Not only that, but the kids themselves are now filling out their own questionnaires, and we have excellent return rates. Transitioning to having the Viva children answer questions themselves in one of our goals as they become teenagers (!).
As always, please contact us if you have any questions about Project Viva or the topics we are studying. We also welcome suggestions for how to make the project even better. As we continue to be successful in getting federal and other grants, we ask you and your family to grow with us into the future! Many thanks again for your ongoing participation.
