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CORVALLIS, Ore. - The National Institutes of Health has awarded an Oregon State University researcher a five-year grant of nearly $1 million to continue a landmark study that suggests young children can increase bone mass and "bank" that extra bone to fight osteoporosis in adulthood.

Christine Snow, the director of OSU's Bone Research Laboratory, will direct the study, working with 2nd-, 3rd- and 4th-grade students at two Corvallis elementary schools.

"There is growing evidence that childhood is the most sensitive time for skeletal mineralization and thus the most opportune time to increase bone mass," Snow said. "So the big question becomes what we can do to increase bone mass early that will have a permanent effect.

"Our early research has show that a regimen of jumping and other carefully monitored load-bearing activities can indeed increase bone mass," she added. "We're not yet sure how long-lasting the effect is, but the initial results are encouraging."

The five-year, $995,681 grant may help determine that as well as whether a longer regimen will result in even greater increases of bone mass.

In Snow's first pilot study, completed in 1998, she and doctoral student Robyn Fuchs found that children as young as 7-8 years old could increase their bone mass by as much as 5 percent through a carefully monitored regimen that had them jumping off two-foot high boxes 100 times, three times a week for seven months.

"A 5 percent increase may not sound like a lot," Snow said at the time, "but it translates into a 30 percent decrease in the risk of a hip fracture at adulthood."

The results of that early study drew national interest in Snow's research, but they also generated as many questions as answers. The NIH gave Snow a three-year, $400,000 grant to continue the study in a larger population of children and to begin exploring whether the increase in bone mass was permanent.

Her follow-up research determined that children who had been through the jumping intervention continued to have higher bone mass than children in a control group - even a year after discontinuing the exercise program. This would not happen in the adult skeleton, said Snow, and her work has shown that in two separate, published research studies.

Over the next five years, Snow and her team of OSU researchers hope to learn whether sequential seven-month jumping interventions will increase bone mass even further, and how long the increase in bone mass will last.

"A critical question is whether these increases in bone mass can be maintained through puberty and into adolescence and young adulthood," Snow said.

"Reproductive hormones exert a powerful influence on the skeleton. We haven't yet had the opportunity to work with students who have been through the jumping intervention and are going through those important bodily changes."

Part of the NIH grant will support the time of physical education specialists at both Hoover and Jefferson elementary schools in Corvallis. The OSU researchers will meet with parents in early September to outline their plans for the study, which include both a control group and an exercise/jumping group.

The OSU researchers also plan to work with previous study participants to determine whether they did indeed "bank" bone mass that has lasted into adolescence.

"The skeleton is unique in that it appears to have a 'memory' for mechanical loading during growth, so the idea that it provides a bone bank from which to draw later in life makes sense," Snow said. "If we can reinforce and expand these results in this NIH study, and show that bone gains are retained into adolescence, this program will unquestionably become a national model and we hope to use the results to lobby for stable funding for physical education in our elementary schools - both locally and nationally. "This program could have dramatic effects on reducing osteoporotic fractures in later life, and thus save billions of dollars in annual health care costs," she added.

Snow said the NIH Consensus Conference on Osteoporosis in 2000, and the Surgeon General's Report on Physical Activity, both now recommend weight-bearing physical activity during childhood as a primary strategy in the prevention of osteoporosis.