The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has begun collecting medical records for its research into autism in the United States.
The data sets, comprised of private medical records from federal and commercial databases, will allow researchers to access “comprehensive” information, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said, as per CBS News.
Bhattacharya reportedly told advisers that the “idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource. Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain.”
According to Bhattacharya, the research collected after assessing the data sets will be “the highest quality proposals” that will range from “basic science to epidemiological approaches, to other more applied approaches” in addressing autism.
“I recognize, of course, that autism, there’s a range of manifestations ranging from highly functioning children to children that are quite severely disabled. And of course the research will account very carefully for that,” he said, according to the report, adding, “What we’re proposing is a transformative real-world data initiative, which aims to provide a robust and secure computational data platform for chronic disease and autism research.”
A recent survey published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that 1 in 31 U.S. children has autism.
“The autism epidemic is running rampant,” said U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “One in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism. That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992.”
“President Trump has tasked me with identifying the root causes of the childhood chronic disease epidemic — including autism,” Kennedy added. “We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September.”
