[ams6110]

I am glad to see that a decision was made to not throw good money into a bad project. They realized that the study as designed was infeasible. I did not see specific reasons but I can only imagine the difficulty of tracking 100,000 individuals through roughly two decades of life, and accounting for the untold number of uncontroled variables that would be present in such an effort.

With research funding recently, it's important that scarce funding be directed to projects that have a reasonable chance at achieving their research goals. This project didn't.

[Fomite]

It should be noted that there are a number of birth cohort studies ongoing in Europe, where single payer healthcare makes it dramatically easier to follow people.

[Someone]

AFAIK, in the EU, the UK is the only country that has single-payer healthcare (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care#Sing...), so I doubt that is the deciding factor.

My money would be on a) more people having insurance, b) having resident registration (that database will have errors, but in cohort studies, people spend lots of time trying to correct that for those in a cohort), c) people, in general, to have more trust in government, certainly where it concerns healthcare, and d) government more willing to look ahead further. I do not have supporting data for c) and d)