November is National Diabetes Month. Diabetes is a disease that occurs when your blood glucose, also called blood sugar, is too high. It can lead to health problems related to your eyes, kidneys, nerves, and heart, and is linked to some types of cancer. Gestational diabetes is diabetes that first appears during pregnancy. This month’s Connector Research Spotlight showcases a recent ECHO study that explores how gestational diabetes, and prenatal depression might be associated with a person’s risk for developing postpartum depression.

Also, around this time each year, I find myself reflecting on how far the ECHO Program has come and where we are heading. I am pleased to announce three major milestones for our program.

First, de-identified data from the ECHO Program are now available as a resource for the entire scientific community. This first public-use version of ECHO-wide Cohort data covers information that our 69 cohort studies collected from 41,299 participants. This momentous step fulfills both a key strategic goal of the ECHO Program and an obligation to U.S. taxpayers for their investment in our research. You can learn more about this data set and how researchers can request access to it in November’s Connector.

Second, our investigators have now published in medical journals more than 1,000 papers about their ECHO research. These publications cover a wide range of topics in child health, and demonstrate how ECHO research is filling evidence gaps on the long-term influences of prenatal and early childhood factors on child and adolescent health. I invite you to visit our ECHO publication database to explore any of these papers.

Finally, we released 7 new 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. I look forward to the next phase of ECHO, and to continued partnership with all of you in our mission to enhance the health of children for generations to come.