[lpolovets]

$1.3b to track 100k kids for 7 years. That's about $2k/child/year, which sounds insanely expensive. How can a study cost that much? You could buy each participant an iPad _every_ year and given them $100/month for filling out surveys, or you could hire 1 researcher for every 25 kids, which sounds grossly inefficient -- and you'd still be under $1.3b for 7 years.

[Fomite]

Surveys don't cut it. There's clinical costs associated with each subject - getting accurate clinical data, biomarkers, needing the infrastructure to store biological specimens for decades. There's methodological issues, planning that needs to get figured out, and the people who do that are not cheap.

The NCS was planned and known to be a massive undertaking, to try to ask some very serious questions about health that are hard to get out without long-term cohort studies.

[lpolovets]

I totally agree with you that this is a complex project with a lot of costs. Still, it's hard for me to fathom where so much money could go. I mean, if you give 100k people 5 top-of-the-line wearables over 7 years (maybe $1500/person); hire 250 experts, each of whom charges $250k/year; and allocate $15m/year on AWS hosting bills... you still wind up at "only" about $700m.

I'm sure the money went somewhere. I'd be really curious to see a breakdown of where.

[Fomite]

http://www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov/about/funding/Pages/in...

Table down at the bottom. As of 2011, 60% of the spend money was spent at the study sites themselves. From the text of that report, it sounds like recruitment was very expensive, which isn't surprising.

[refurb]

Hold on! It says the study never went beyond a small pilot? Where did the $1.3B go?

[Fomite]

The "small pilot" was a 40 center study enrolling 1,750 pregnant women. There are some fixed costs to a study like that, especially if they're supposed to also apply to the larger study, and there has been a lot of work done in developing the appropriate methods for the NCS - over 100 research papers worth of it.

Also, as has been said, it's not clear if all the allocated money has actually been spent.

[x0x0]

The blood work at my annual checkup cost $600. Test blood twice a year, plus send a nurse out to get it, and you're in for $1300.

Monthly interviewing to monitor diet adds another couple hundred dollars.

[lostlogin]

I'm not trying to start a USA bash, but I'm pretty sure cost of those bloods is not $600. If you wanted into a clinic and asked for a cash price I'm pretty sure it would be lower. I base this claim on looking at medical bills in a far away country with an utterly different system.

[Fomite]

At the same time, the blood draws for this study are looking for things your average clinic isn't going to do for a walk in. And unlike the system in the U.S., or another country, this isn't being done for the patient's health specifically, but rather for research, so there is no subsidy, either from insurance or the government health system.

Basically, we have no idea how much it would cost.