HICCUP

Summary

Healthy Infants and Children's Clinical Research Program (HICCUP).

Research is essential to improving the health and lives of children and families everywhere.

Many studies require participation from children who are healthy. Other   studies compare a healthy group to one with a particular illness. These participants are called controls and they are crucial to studies exploring the causes, treatments, and outcomes of virtually all pediatric diseases. Successful control matching is a challenge for all clinical pediatric researchers but one that the community at large has the capacity to solve.

HICCUP was designed to harness the generous and giving spirit of the southern Alberta community to overcome this problem and provide the opportunity for improved child health research.  We are building a large sample of healthy children and parents willing to consider participation in healthy control research. HICCUP provides a direct opportunity for children, families, and communities to directly contribute to the advancement of research and child health in Alberta. Many families wanting to “give something back” can do so by volunteering their time to help child and community health in a positive way.

The HICCUP program will provide leading researchers and investigators with easy, equal, systematic access to healthy controls to be invited to participate in their own studies. This will drastically improve efficiencies while reducing costs, allowing researchers to be more productive and focused on the problems they are targeting. The result is the direct enhancement of all child and family health clinical research in southern Alberta, potentially serving as a model to advance such systems in other pediatric research settings.