The Best Start for BC Children

Asked why he would leave the congenial research and cultural environment of California’s San Francisco Bay area and move to British Columbia, UBC Pediatrics Professor Tom Boyce gave three reasons. “First, I’ve had fruitful research collaborations with people at UBC from my base at the University of California at Berkeley for a number of years. So BC is not unfamiliar to me. Second, there’s the freedom and excitement of vigorously pursuing my research that the BC Leadership Chair provides. And third, my wife is making a career change. She’s been a nurse practitioner for 25 years, but wants to become a hospital chaplain. She can do this through Regent College, a non-denominational Christian college on the UBC campus.”

His “Sunny Hill Health Centre BC Leadership Chair in Early Childhood Development” recognizes the Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children Foundation’s $2.25 million contribution to the Chair, which matches LEEF’s contribution from the BC government. Sunny Hill is a hospital and out-patient facility for children with developmental disabilities, located in Vancouver. Other contributors to the Chair include Dr. Don Rix and the Lawson and Koerner Foundations. Together they have boosted the Chair’s total value to $6 million.

“Few things are as important as ensuring children have the best possible start in life, and that whatever challenges they face, they receive the support they need,” said Sue Carruthers, President and CEO of BC Children’s Hospital Foundation, which administers the Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children Foundation. “We are happy to support Dr. Boyce’s work.”

“The fundamental problem I’m studying is why disease and illness in childhood populations is distributed along socio-economic lines,” Dr. Boyce explains. “From an epidemiological standpoint, economic status is the most powerful known predictor of how diseases will be distributed within human populations that we know of. My colleagues and I are trying to understand how and why this happens. We’re studying the underlying neurobiology and genetic biology that underpins health disparities.”

Dr. Boyce acknowledges that socioeconomic disparities and their causes seem pretty obvious. Children growing up on the west side of Vancouver, for example, are likely to be healthier than those growing up on the city’s east side. “Yes, of course, we know this. We know that nutrition, access to medical care and the kind of stimulation a child gets at home make a difference. But there’s also evidence that where and how you are reared affects not only health during childhood but mortality, longevity and chronic mental and physical diseases later in life.

“Even when we take the most obvious connectors between social class and health, they only account for about half of the variance in that association. So, there’s something else there -- some other ‘black box.’ We need to know how early experiences interact with the biology of the developing child to influence their lifelong health and well-being.”

The answers appear to lie, at least in part, in genetics. “There are two kinds of genetic influences here. One is the effect of an individual’s genome itself, since certain disease risks can be inherited. The second – called ‘epigenetics’ -- is just beginning to emerge as a research area. It’s about how early social experience affects gene expression. This is the line of research we’re pursuing, thanks to LEEF and the other contributors to this Chair.”

He and his colleagues hope that, as answers to questions about how experience affects gene expression are found, they would form the basis for policy changes regarding child health and development. Such information should help pediatricians and family physicians guide families in the parenting of young children.

Dr. Boyce divides his research time between the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), based at UBC and the Centre for Community Child Health Research (CCCHR) at the Children’s and Women’s Health Centre in Vancouver. HELP is an interdisciplinary research network linking over 200 faculty, researchers and graduate students from UBC, the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, the University of Northern BC, Thompson Rivers University and UBC Okanagan. One of HELP’s major projects is acquiring and mapping developmental and socio-economic data on BC’s children. CCCHR is multidisciplinary group of child health and development researchers supported by the Child and Family Research Institute.

Dr. Boyce still maintains research ties with colleagues in California. Indeed, he recently received a grant from the US National Institute of Mental Health that will support new projects at both UBC and the University of California at Berkeley, and collaborations between the two. “Part of what is so wonderful here in BC,” he points out, “is the access that researchers have to administrative databases. This is made possible because there’s a single health care system in BC, which is not the case in California.”

For additional information on Dr. Boyce and HELP, visit www.earlylearning.ubc.ca.