A newly published feature, Year in Review 2024, reflects how the ECHO Cohort Consortium has continued to enhance child health for generations to come.

Through the ECHO Cohort, a collaborative approach to gathering information from study participants across dozens of research awards, many of the nation’s leading researchers are working together to examine a broad range of early environmental influences—including socioeconomic status, family support, biological factors, nutrition, and physical and chemical exposures.

Currently, the NIH is funding 45 ECHO Cohort awards at academic medical centers across the country where investigators and their teams completed activation of 77 study sites where researchers enroll participants and collect data. These sites are located across 30 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. ECHO Cohort study sites are identified in blue on the map.

In the past year, these research teams have enrolled nearly 6,000 pregnancies on the way to the program’s goal of 30,000 new pregnant participants. When those babies are born, they join the 30,000 existing child participants in the ECHO Cohort.

In 2024, ECHO research teams completed numerous analyses of the data collected in the ECHO Cohort, drawing important conclusions about how environmental influences impact child health outcomes. These insights were shared in 48 research articles published by peer-reviewed science and public health journals over the year.

The consortium’s work in 2024—from activating study sites to enrolling participants to publishing research analyses—represents another year of growth, collaboration, and learning.