After 31+ years, over 200 abstracts and publications, and the involvement of countless faculty, staff and students, formal funding for the Iowa Fluoride Study (IFS) will end in Summer of 2023.  Originally funded on September 1, 1991, as a 5-year NIH grant with a total budget of $1.3 million, the study recruited nearly 1,900 participants in Iowa hospital post-partum units from 1992-1995, and then, remarkably, followed this cohort for nearly a quarter-century, with formal subject contact (i.e., exams, questionnaires, etc.) ending in 2019.  During that time, the IFS and the companion Iowa Bone Development Study (IBDS) were awarded nearly $30 million from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research/National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other sources.  For students in the graduate program, IFS/IBDS data have been the focus of at least 14 MS theses or PhD dissertations, with another one in progress.

Over the past 3+ years, the IFS/IBDS staff have been meticulously assembling and cataloging the IFS/IBDS data so that it can be shared with NIH, who will make it available for other researchers to use and analyze. The first part of the IFS/IBDS data has recently been made available through the repository named dbGaP and more data will be finalized and made available in 2023. However, that doesn’t necessarily ‘end’ activities for the IFS/IBDS team, as current data analyses are continuing under two new NIH (R03) grants and additional MS or PhD projects are likely in the near future.

Asked to comment on the IFS/IBDS, the Principal Investigator, Dr. Steven Levy, said “It really is incredible that we were able to keep the study going so long, especially with how competitive NIH funding has become. This is a credit to our great research team faculty, including dental faculty, Drs. John Warren, Justine Kolker, Karin Weber-Gasparoni, and Mike Kanellis and non-COD faculty from the Colleges of Public Health, Medicine, Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Engineering. We had great project staff, most recently including Eileen Hermiston, Barb Simon, Chandler Pendleton, and Dr. Julie Eichenberger-Gilmore, but previously including Joan Welsh-Grabin and ~ 10 other COD staff and 10 other non-COD staff. And, perhaps most importantly, we remember and appreciate the great commitment of the mothers who joined with their newborns, who remained in the study, and who had their children become young adult participants providing their own consent and responses”.