Research Section Sponsored Session: The NIH Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program

Description: The National Institutes of Health recently issued funding opportunity announcements to develop the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program, a novel 7-year, $165M per year effort to better understand the impacts on health and development of environmental exposures in early life. ECHO builds on the former National Children’s Study, and another recent initiative to support the development of new tools and technologies to accurately measure, record and analyze environmental exposures. ECHO is designed to capitalize on existing population cohorts to better investigate the immediate and delayed health consequences of early-life environmental exposures.

This session will provide an overview of environmental threats to children’s health, changing patterns of pediatric disease, and the contribution of environmental exposures to disease and disability. New information will be reviewed linking environmental exposures in early life to disease in childhood and across the life span, the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHAD) concept. The session will explore ECHO, its objectives, its methodologies, and its anticipated contributions to scientific knowledge.