NIH’s www.nih.gov $157 million in awards for FY 2016 are going to be used to launch a seven year initiative called “Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes” (ECHO) www.nih.gov/echo.
The ECHO program will investigate how exposure to a range of environmental factors in early development influences the health of children and adolescents. The funding will help build the infrastructure for the ECHO program to support multiple longitudinal studies to expand existing cohort studies of mothers and their children.
ECHO components related to collecting data and network development include:
- Pediatric cohorts to enroll more than 50,000 children from diverse racial, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Data will be analyzed as well as follow the children to address the early environmental origins of at least one of ECHO’s health outcome areas. Go to www.nih.gov/echo/pediatric-cohorts for awardees
- Initiating the ECHO Coordinating Center responsible for managing logistics for all collaborative components of the initiative including coordination of the cohort study design, evaluation of progress, and tissue sample storage. Go to www.nih.gov/echo/coordinating-center for awardees
- Initiating the Data Analysis Center responsible for managing, developing, and applying new analytic methods in order to combine and analyze existing and new longitudinal data from participating cohorts. The Center will conduct sophisticated multi-level analyses on pooled consortium data to pinpoint potential causes of child health outcomes. Go to www.nih.gov/echo/data-analysis-center for awardees
- The ECHO Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) Core will be responsible for maintaining and providing PRO information for researchers, and assist with incorporating PROs into studies. www.nih.gov/echo/patient-reported-outcomes-core
- The Data Coordinating and Operations Center will be the central site within the “IDEA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network” (ISPCTN) to coordinate data, provide technical instruction, data standards, quality control, and coordination for the “IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network”. Go to www.nih.gov/echo/data-coordinating-operations-center-idea-states-pediatric-clinical-trials-network for awardees
Go to www.nih.gov/echo for more information on the ECHO program components. Go to https://youtu.be/-iausJBlkEW to see the video.