THE ECHO PROGRAM HAS ADDED PLAIN-LANGUAGE SUMMARIES FOR ITS PROGRAM-WIDE PUBLICATIONS
A new resource on the ECHO Program website—the Study Summaries page under the Sharing Our Science tab on the ECHO website—invites visitors to read plain-language study summaries of ECHO publications. The new page continues our commitment to sharing results for ECHO Program studies.
Summaries include research on:
General health and life satisfaction in children with chronic illness
Prenatal opioid exposure and its effects on child health outcomes
The potential role of Vitamin E in preventing or treating bronchopulmonary dysplasia
The ECHO Coordinating Center will continue to post ECHO study summaries as they become available.
The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program announced today that it has activated its first sites to begin data collection under the ECHO-wide Cohort Data Collection Protocol. Congratulations to the Safe Passage Study (PASS) Cohort, led by Principal Investigator Amy Elliott, sites at Avera Health – Rapid City and Avera Health – Sioux Falls.
“This site activation marks the beginning of ECHO’s next chapter, allowing us to begin collecting data that will enhance the health of children for generations to come,” said ECHO Program Director Matthew Gillman, NIH. “ECHO is uniquely positioned, through an innovative study design, to answer transdisciplinary research questions that have not been explored in observational research to date.”
The ECHO cohorts seek to improve the health of children and adolescents by conducting observational research that will inform high-impact programs, policies, and practices across the United States. ECHO uses information from existing longitudinal research projects (cohorts) that will include more than 50,000 children from diverse backgrounds across the United States. Together, these cohorts follow participants from before they are born, through childhood and adolescence.
The studies focus on five key pediatric outcomes that have a high public health impact:
Pre-, peri-, and postnatal
Upper and lower airways
Obesity
Neurodevelopment
Positive Health
To learn more about the ECHO Program, visit our About ECHO Page.
This landmark agreement enables the Navajo Birth Cohort Study (NBCS) to continue as part of the ECHO Program.
A Mother’s Love. Mallery Quetawki (Zuni Pueblo). University of New Mexico College of Pharmacy-Community Environmental Health Program
May 8, 2019
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) facilitated a data-sharing and use agreement between the Navajo Nation and NIH grantees of the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program at the Navajo Nation Head Start Center in Leupp, Arizona. This agreement, signed by the Navajo Nation, Johns Hopkins University, and RTI International, enables the Navajo Birth Cohort Study to continue participating in the ECHO Program while maintaining respect for Navajo Nation cultural beliefs, Tribal sovereignty, and community values. Additionally, the agreement serves as the first Tribal data-sharing agreement for a nationwide research consortium creating a large-scale database.
“Through this agreement I am confident that data sharing will benefit our Navajo people and allow us to further understand the relationship between uranium exposure, birth effects and childhood development,” said Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez. “I am optimistic that through this partnership, the Navajo Birth Cohort Study will continue to progress and clarify the environmental impacts on our children’s health.”
The landmark agreement is the culmination of two years of discussion facilitated by NIH, and lays the groundwork for discussions with other Tribal Nations considering participation in biomedical research programs. Most importantly, the study is poised to benefit Navajo mothers and children as well as mothers and children everywhere. More information about the agreement can be found in the NIH news release here.
ECHO will have a strong presence at the 2019 Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD.
The ECHO Program will spotlight its advancement of child health research through three special ECHO-wide sessions at this year’s PAS Meeting in Baltimore, MD. These sessions are in addition to numerous abstracts that ECHO investigators are presenting in oral or poster sessions.
In the 3 special sessions, NIH Program Director Matt Gillman and several ECHO Investigators will present various perspectives on ECHO science, both from ECHO’s Cohorts and its IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network. One is a state-of-the-art plenary session devoted to outlining the goals and early findings of the ECHO Program.
“The mission of ECHO to enhance the health of children for generations to come will resonate with the PAS community,” said Gillman. “We are looking forward to sharing our early findings with the larger pediatrics community. We hope that these presentations will generate excitement around ECHO as we forge the next steps of the Program, both on the observational side, where we are building the ECHO-wide Cohort of more than 50,000 children, and on the intervention side, where the IDeA States Network is providing access for children from rural and underserved backgrounds to participate in state-of-the-art clinical trials.”
Descriptions of each ECHO-related special session:
Saturday, April 27th, 2:45 PM – 4:15 PM, Convention Center 301-302
This 90-minute session will focus on the impact that population-based cohort studies can have on advancing knowledge in child health. The session will feature overviews of the NIH All of Us Program, the Boston Birth Cohort Study, and the ECHO Program. Dr. Gillman will present an overview of ECHO, titled Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes: Leveraging Multiple Cohort Studies.
Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 – 6:00 PM, Convention Center 313
This 3-hour workshop will focus on empowering residents, fellows, faculty, program directors, and departmental leadership with the tools to successfully build research collaboratives through team science. IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network PI Jessica Snowden will introduce and close the workshop as one of the session chairs.
Tuesday, April 30th, 9:45 AM – 11:45 AM, Convention Center 316
This 2-hour State of the Art Plenary session will focus solely on the ECHO Program, featuring an introduction by Dr. Gillman. ECHO PIs Drs. Nigel Paneth and Robert Wright will moderate the session, and three ECHO investigators will present current findings from their ECHO-funded projects. Presentations within this session include:
Leslie Young MD, FAAP, University of Vermont, will describe how ECHO addresses the Neonatal Opioid Abstinence Syndrome
Anne Dunlop MD, MPH, Emory University, will present a paper entitled: Geographic and Temporal Variation in the Effects of Socio-demographic Factors on Risk of Preterm Birth in the US.
Aruna Chandran MD, MPH, FAAP, Johns Hopkins University, will present a paper entitled: Epidemiology of Incident Asthma in Children across the US: Unique insights from the ECHO multi-cohort consortium.
In preparation for these talks, we sat down with a few ECHO presenters to learn more about what they planned to cover. Watch our videos below.
The ECHO Program looks forward to sharing its learnings with PAS attendees at this year’s meeting. To learn more about PAS presentations, or to add these presentations to your PAS schedule, visit the PAS website here.
Single institutional review board approves the NIH’s ECHO cohort research to proceed, which promises answers to high-impact research questions related to early influences on child health outcomes.
February 1, 2019
The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program today announced it has received single institutional review board (sIRB) approval to begin its research under the ECHO-wide Cohort Data Collection Protocol. The purpose of the sIRB is to ensure that research follows guidelines to protect participants. ECHO research will investigate the effects of a broad range of early exposures—including physical, chemical, biological, social, behavioral, natural, and built environments—on child health and development.
“The sIRB approval of the ECHO-wide Cohort Data Collection Protocol gives us the green light to start finding answers to important questions that will enhance the health of children for generations to come,” said ECHO Program Director Matthew Gillman. “We know that a child’s exposures from before birth through the first few years of life are tremendously formative, and yet, until now, child health research in this area has been limited, leaving us with lots of questions. We look forward to turning that tide.”
The ECHO-wide Cohort is made up of more than 70 individual cohorts, or groups, of mothers and children from ongoing research projects. Researchers follow participants through different life stages, some starting before birth and through adolescence. Together, they form a massive virtual “cohort of cohorts” that includes more than 50,000 children from diverse backgrounds across the United States. By bringing together data collected under a single protocol, ECHO researchers can answer high-impact, complex research questions.
Looking at the whole child
ECHO’s promise is not only in its breadth of data, but also its approach, which brings together multiple disciplines to address child health. Historically, many research projects have looked at children through a single, narrow lens. However, the body’s development process includes millions of interacting factors that all play a part in a child’s overall health. Researchers from 44 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia are involved in the ECHO-wide Cohort Data Collection Protocol. These researchers bring expertise from hundreds of disciplines. As a result, knowledge from ECHO research can offer a richer understanding of child health and development to help guide a healthier, happier childhood for our nation’s children.
Emily Oken, of Harvard University and the principal investigator for an ECHO Pediatric Cohort Award, and David Cella, of Northwestern University and one of the principal investigators for the ECHO Person-Reported Outcomes Core, led the trans-disciplinary development of the ECHO-wide Cohort Data Collection Protocol. They worked collaboratively with all ECHO components and gathered input through a public comment period. The research will include participants that are often excluded from traditional research, such as pregnant women, children, and caregivers. ECHO’s researchers hope that this wide view of the child will shed light on important patterns and trends in child health that have not been captured to date.
“It was a Herculean effort to develop a protocol of this scale with so many interacting variables,” said Gillman. “Through collaboration and a shared passion to enhance the health of all children, we are now positioned to begin this important work. Our team is energized and ready to go, and our nation’s children are waiting.”
Dr. Gillman wrote a post for the National Library of Medicine blog about the ways the ECHO Program aims maximize the value of data from a large, multi-cohort consortium and model it to the scientific and general community. Read the post here.
On August 11th, 2017 the NIH published an RFI seeking feedback from stakeholders and the general public on the ECHO-wide Cohort Data Collection Protocol. The RFI specifically requested feedback and recommendations on the data element concepts, types of biospecimens, and innovative data collection methodology. The NIH received a number of responses from researchers, professional organizations, nonprofit organizations, and research foundations. View the responses to this RFI here. The NIH thanks all responders for their input.
On August 10, 2017, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released a Request for Information (RFI) to solicit input from a wide variety of stakeholders on the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO)-wide Cohort Data Collection Protocol. Stakeholders that the NIH hopes will respond to the RFI include: non-ECHO researchers, advocacy groups, professional organizations, and the general public. Comments are due by September 13, 2017. For more information and to contribute, please visit: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-17-090.html.
Background
Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) is a nationwide NIH-funded research program whose mission is to enhance the health of children for generations to come. The program consists of observational and intervention components. This RFI pertains to the observational component, the ECHO Pediatric Cohorts. The overall scientific goal of the ECHO Pediatric Cohorts is to investigate associations of a broad array of early environmental influences with child health and development. ECHO prioritizes addressing research questions that have impact on policies, practices, and programs.
As we begin 2017, I reflect on the promising strides ECHO has made and look forward to successes in 2017 and beyond. In November 2016, we kicked off ECHO in a big way. Bringing together all of ECHO’s Components under one roof, we hit the scientific ground running and began to foster the culture of collaboration that is vital to ECHO’s success. We witnessed ECHO’s investigators taking leadership positions in our Working Groups. We observed rapid progress when these investigators collaborated in small groups and shared what they learned in larger group discussion.
ECHO’s long-term goals are both scientific and strategic. From a scientific perspective, our goal is to improve the health of children and adolescents by conducting solution-oriented research that informs high-impact programs, policies, and practices. From a strategic perspective, we aim to institute best practices for how to conduct Team Science in the 21st century. We’ve set an ambitious agenda for our first year, which includes 1) achieving early scientific wins by capitalizing on one of ECHO’s most powerful features: the extant data of its existing Cohorts, and 2) crafting a robust infrastructure for the IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network to begin initiating trials in our second year.
I am thrilled with the progress we have made, but ECHO’s most exciting days will be in 2017 and beyond. ECHO is underpinned by the fundamental notion that when we all row in the same direction, the whole is greater than the sum of our parts. For ECHO’s Cohorts, this means knitting a tapestry of the ECHO-wide Cohort and harmonizing its extant data. For CHEAR Core, PRO Core, and the DAC, it means analyzing existing and new insights and standardizing data collection. On the interventional side, the IDeA States Network is endeavoring to prioritize trials that examine focus areas that are similar to the Cohorts’: pre-, peri- and postnatal health, childhood obesity, airways disorders, and neurodevelopment.
As we continue to bring ECHO to life in 2017, we will begin to address questions that link a broad range of early environmental influences to the health of a highly diverse population of children and adolescents. We are eager to begin this journey to move the needle in improving child health.
On November 9th and 10th, nearly 200 outstanding scientists came together to launch the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program—and it was a major success. Attendees felt genuine enthusiasm to be part of ECHO’s mission to enhance the health of our nation’s children, guided by the principles of teamwork, impact, responsibility, and value.
During his presentation, NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., emphasized the special place for ECHO in the long history of NIH-sponsored, population-based, observational cohort and intervention research. Large sample sizes and new technologies are allowing us to zero in on answers to solution-oriented research questions in ways that were not possible just a few years ago.
I am so grateful for the engagement and productivity that I witnessed coming out of the working groups that we initiated at the Kickoff Meeting. Half of the groups started developing scientific hypotheses that ECHO Cohorts can achieve with existing data, even within our first year. These hypotheses prioritized the five ECHO focus areas: pre- and perinatal outcomes, child obesity, airways, neurodevelopment, and positive health outcomes.
The other half of the working groups focused on policies and practices—for data sharing, harmonization, and analysis; use of biospecimens; publications; and engagement—that we envision will drive best practices for conducting team science in the 21stcentury.
One of the most inspiring aspects of the meeting was the contributions of all six funded components of ECHO. In addition to the Cohorts, they include the IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network, the Children’s Health and Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) Core, the Patient-Reported Outcomes Core, the Data Analysis Center, and the Coordinating Center. Altogether they comprise 110 principal investigators and their institutions from more than 40 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. These investigators, with my colleagues from across the NIH institutes, centers, and offices, will be instrumental in leading ECHO to achieve its long-term vision of becoming a pre-eminent research program in child health.
