The Camden Study, a pregnancy cohort of 4,765 women recruited between 1985 and 2006 from one of America’s poorest cities, has found new life at Rutgers University – where it promises to unlock critical insights into maternal and child health for researchers worldwide.
According to a recent paper in Nutrients, the project was designed to study nutritional status in adolescent pregnancies but expanded into a comprehensive repository of maternal and infant health data that yielded more than a decade of significant papers. Yet, it never gained widespread recognition as a major resource that others could mine. Rutgers Health researchers Zorimar Rivera-Núñez and Emily Barrett had never heard of the Camden, N.J., cohort until several years ago, when many of the studies they read cited it as a source of fascinating data.
“We started looking for more papers from the Camden cohort, and more papers and more papers. We were just like, ‘Oh my god, what is this cohort in our home state that we don’t know about?’” said Rivera-Núñez, adding she and Barrett soon reached out to the scholar who had been maintaining the data, Xinhua Chen, a professor at Rowan University. To read the full story.