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Birth of a cohort — the first 20 years of the Raine study

Charlotte M McKnight, John P Newnham, Fiona J Stanley, Jenny A Mountain, Louis I Landau, Lawrence J Beilin, Ian B Puddey, Craig E Pennell and David A Mackey
Med J Aust 2012; 197 (11): . || doi: 10.5694/mja12.10698
Published online: 10 December 2012

Participant engagement and careful planning are key to a successful cohort study

In the beginning there was an idea ... and funding. The project might never have started if not for a serendipitous meeting between an accountant for the Raine Medical Research Foundation and a young obstetrician. The Foundation had been established 30 years earlier by the bequest of Mary Raine (Box 1), a successful businesswoman who left her property empire to the University of Western Australia (UWA) for medical research. The accountant mentioned that the Foundation had decided to award a large sum of money to one big, visionary project, and the very next day the grant application was underway.


  • University of Western Australia, Perth, WA.


Correspondence: craig.pennell@uwa.edu.au

Acknowledgements: 

We wish to sincerely thank the Raine study participants and their families, and the Raine Study Team for coordination and data collection. We acknowledge UWA, the Raine Medical Research Foundation at UWA, Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, UWA Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, the Women and Infants Research Foundation and Curtin University for providing core management funding. For further information about the Raine study, please contact Craig Pennell (craig.pennell@uwa.edu.au) or see http://www.rainestudy.org.au/.

Competing interests:

No relevant disclosures.

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