SUMMARY
The Linked CENTURY Study: Linking three decades of Clinical and Public health data
Purpose
Despite fall in childhood obesity in US; there is no evidence that the rest of the world has
also experienced same progress. Examining racial and socioeconomic factors regarding
people who are comparatively at greater risk. According to life course epidemiology, factors
during the start and end of pregnancy affect the development of obesity from early life till
adulthood. Besides, exposure to antibiotics during the first year of birth and caesarian deliveries
has also added to this problem. Factors including access to food, prospects for physical activities
and neighborhood dispossession are the proposed contributing elements to this modern age
dilemma at macro level. These factors also explain to a large extent, the cause of ethnic
differences in obesity at childhood level. However, there have been certain limitations regarding
the current epidemiologic studies of early life including limited sources of data in US with low
degree of information about the pre and post natal risk factors, weight and height across
The purpose of the article was to develop Linked Century study by means of creating a
link between the Century study, which is a clinical database entailing data regarding measured
weight and height along with birth certificate of every child in Massachusetts. Secondly this
article was aimed at discussing the medical, epidemiologic and public health inferences of this
Findings
74.25 of the records matched successfully leading to 200,343 children in the Linked
CENTURY Study with 1,580,597 well child visits. 94% of the children were identified as those
whose father information was available on the birth certificate and 60.9% of the children were
reported to have at least one other sibling. In terms of ethnicity, it was found that 75.7 % of
children were white, 11.6 % black, 4.6 % Hispanic, and 5.7 % Asian. Based on socio-
demographic information from the birth certificate, 20.0 % of mothers were non-US born, 5.9 %
smoked during pregnancy, 76.3 % initiated breastfeeding, and 11.0 % of mothers had their
delivery paid for by public health insurance. Using clinical data from the CENTURY Study, 22.7
% of children had a weight-for-length 95th percentile between 1 and 24 months and 12.0 % of
children had a body mass index 95th percentile at ages 5 and 17 years.
Conclusion
Childhood obesity is one of the major dilemmas of todays world with its origins in the
earliest phases of life and affect children from diverse ethnic groups and underprivileged
database and each childs birth certificate, Linked Century study has got the potential to identify
Reference
Hawkins, S., Gillman, M., Rifas-Shiman, S., Kleinman, K., Mariotti, M. and Taveras, E. (2016).
The Linked CENTURY Study: linking three decades of clinical and public health data to