EARLY CHILDHOOD INVESTMENTS SUBSTANTIALLY BOOST ADULT HEALTH

By F. Campbell, G. Conti, James J. Heckman, S. Moon, Rodrigo Pinto, E. Pungello, Yi Pan. Science, 2014

1,119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Look After the Child Investing in children has been demonstrated to improve their lives, both during the school-age years and afterward, as assessed by outcomes such as employment and income; furthermore, these investments often help those in the most need. Campbell et al. (p. 1478) report that these investments can also lead to improved adult health. Results from a randomized and intensive intervention that involved 122 children in four cohorts recruited in the 1970s suggest that full-day child care for the first 5 years of life has produced adults in their 30s with better metabolic and cardiovascular health measures. Large investments in preschool children’s education, health care, and nutrition provide long-term health benefits. High-quality early childhood programs have been shown to have substantial benefits in reducing crime, raising earnings, and promoting education. Much less is known about their benefits for adult health. We report on the long-term health effects of one of the oldest and most heavily cited early childhood interventions with long-term follow-up evaluated by the method of randomization: the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC). Using recently collected biomedical data, we find that disadvantaged children randomly assigned to treatment have significantly lower prevalence of risk factors for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in their mid-30s. The evidence is especially strong for males. The mean systolic blood pressure among the control males is 143 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg), whereas it is only 126 mm Hg among the treated. One in four males in the control group is affected by metabolic syndrome, whereas none in the treatment group are affected. To reach these conclusions, we address several statistical challenges. We use exact permutation tests to account for small sample sizes and conduct a parallel bootstrap confidence interval analysis to confirm the permutation analysis. We adjust inference to account for the multiple hypotheses tested and for nonrandom attrition. Our evidence shows the potential of early life interventions for preventing disease and promoting health.

Subfields: Education, General Health Professions, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20c90e58d5fde2e3571b12eb3f6e84695a46a849

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Citations in the corpus

Efficient computation of adjusted p-values for resampling-based stepdown multiple testing (2016, methodology): “(2010), Campbell et al. (2014), Gertler et al. (2014), and Dobbie and Fryer (2015).”
Ever Failed, Try Again, Succeed Better: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention on Grit* (2019, positive): “Given the ubiquity of challenging tasks and frequent performance feedback encountered in educational and employment settings, and the central question of how to motivate 1Well-known examples of early childhood and elementary school programs include the Perry Preschool program (Heckman et al., 2010, ”
Education Improves Public Health and Promotes Health Equity (2015, background): “By their mid-30 s, those exposed to the intervention, particularly males, had substantially more favorable cardiovascular risk profiles than those exposed to the control condition.(42) Finally, though not a true experiment, the Chicago Child-Parent Center program followed two groups of poor Chicago ”
The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes (2019, positive): “In particular, the results add to a growing literature which shows that early-life interventions can have large, causal impacts on children’s outcomes (Garces et al., 2002; Ludwig and Miller, 2007; Almond et al., 2010; Chetty et al., 2011; Bharadwaj et al., 2013; Heckman et al., 2013; Campbell et al”
THE DETERMINANTS OF HUMAN CAPITAL FORMATION DURING THE EARLY YEARS OF LIFE: THEORY, MEASUREMENT, AND POLICIES (2015, positive): “…were evaluated with a double randomization design and the first stage has been shown to have a variety of long-run impacts.14 Most recently, Campbell et al. (2014) show that ABC had an impact on a variety of health outcomes, including the prevalence of obesity and blood pressure when the…”
Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success (2014, neutral): “16 See Campbell, Pungello, Miller-Johnson, Burchinal, and Ramey (2001); Campbell, Ramey, Pungello, Sparling, and Miller-Johnson (2002).”
Parental Beliefs About Returns to Educational Investments - The Later the Better? (2015, neutral): “2010, Heckman, Pinto and Savelyev 2013) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (Campbell et al. 2014).”
Practitioner Review: Engaging fathers – recommendations for a game change in parenting interventions based on a systematic review of the global evidence (2014, background): “…delivered to disadvantaged children in the early years of life: early child development programs offer both a cost-efficient way to produce a capable workforce and an equity-gain in helping those at greatest disadvantage (Heckman, 2009; Heckman & Masterov, 2007; Campbell et al., 2014).”
Childhood Circumstances and Adult Outcomes: Act II (2018, background): “Studies by Heckman, Pinto and Savelyev (2013), Campbell et al. (2014), and Conti, Heckman, and Pinto (2015) add to this literature by showing that the interventions had positive effects on a broader set of outcomes than had previously been considered.”