September is Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. Obesity can affect children’s physical and psychosocial health and can lead to substantial health problems later in life, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Obesity is one of ECHO’s five child health outcome areas. This month’s Research Spotlight highlights a recent ECHO study that found that school-age children, on average, gained weight at a higher rate during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic than they did during the couple of years before.

ECHO researchers also asked what behaviors could explain this excess pandemic-related weight gain. In another recent study of children from before to during the pandemic, they found that screen time—both educational and recreational—increased substantially, whereas sleep duration, diet, and physical activity hardly changed. Screen time takes many forms in kids’ lives these days. Reducing non-productive screen time can lead to less weight gain in children and adolescents.

Both of these studies suggested worse effects among Hispanic or non-Hispanic Black children. Research leading to reducing health disparities and improving health equity are ECHO priorities.

Both of these studies also took advantage of the fact that ECHO began before the pandemic and continues during these many months since it began. That means that ECHO is one of the very few large research programs that has followed individual children over time (“longitudinally”) to see how the pandemic has affected them and their families. Many ECHO researchers are characterizing these wide-ranging effects, and are starting to identify solutions that may offer resilience in the face of hardships.

In addition to my enthusiasm about the burgeoning research coming from ECHO, I am also excited to announce that the next phase of ECHO is within sight. The ECHO Program Office recently released Cohort Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) to invite applications to extend and expand the ECHO Cohort to further investigate the influences of a broad range of early exposures from society to biology, including the preconception period, across ECHO’s five key child health outcome areas among diverse populations.

Frequently Asked Questions and pre-recorded informational webinars regarding these funding opportunities are now available on the NIH ECHO website. I encourage your to use our toolkit to share these FOAs with your networks.