(COLUMBUS, Ohio) – A research team at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center was recently awarded $17.7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to join a national consortium to study how childhood environments and experiences influence the health of children as they grow and develop.
The overarching goal of the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program is to identify factors that influence children’s health from birth through adulthood. The Ohio site will be led by an interdisciplinary team of scientists including Sarah Keim, PhD, and Jonathan Slaughter, MD, at Nationwide Children’s, and Courtney Lynch, PhD, and Kartik Venkatesh, MD, PhD, at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center.
“This work unifies the efforts of two very successful research teams. Nationwide Children’s investment in the Ohio Perinatal Research Network and its Perinatal Research Repository, which has been a collaborative effort with Ohio State over the past decade, has been key in developing the infrastructure and expertise necessary to undertake this work,” said Slaughter, a neonatologist and principal investigator in the Center for Perinatal Research at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's and associate professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at Ohio State Colleges of Medicine and Public Health.
The research team will enroll and follow 675 pregnant people, their partners and resulting children through childhood beginning in early 2024. Ohio State will enroll the pregnant individuals and their partners. Once the babies are born, the families will transition to Nationwide Children’s for long-term follow-up. Among the data collected, the Ohio team will focus on how the birth parent’s cardiometabolic health – the health of the cardiovascular and metabolic systems – during pregnancy influences childhood neurodevelopment and behavior.
“Given our historic and current efforts in leading clinical care and research in cardiometabolic health in pregnancy, our cohort will lend expertise and focus on the impact of birth parent cardiometabolic risk on long-term child health," said Venkatesh, a maternal fetal medicine physician, epidemiologist and assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and epidemiology at Ohio State Colleges of Medicine and Public Health.
The investigators will also collaborate with other ECHO sites to complete additional scientific investigations using the consortium-wide data.
“I’m particularly pleased that the study will address so many of the concerns parents in Ohio have about their children’s health, including neurodevelopmental conditions like ADHD and autism, obesity and growth, asthma, and pregnancy and newborn health. ECHO also focuses on what makes kids healthy, not just what makes them sick,” said Keim, a principal investigator in the Center for Biobehavioral Health at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's and professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the Ohio State Colleges of Medicine and Public Health.
Additional investigators on the Ohio ECHO team include Christopher Bartlett, PhD, Mykyta Artomov, PhD, Mark Klebanoff, MD, Rodney Britt, PhD, and Amrik Khalsa, MD, from Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Maged Costantine, MD, William Grobman, MD, and Joshua Joseph, MD from Ohio State Wexner Medical Center.
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to participate in what will be one of the largest cohort studies of pregnant individuals and their children conducted in the U.S. to date. The data collected as part of this project will be used to develop interventions to optimize the health of children across the nation for generations to come,” said Lynch, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist and associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and epidemiology at Ohio State Colleges of Medicine and Public Health.
More information about the ECHO consortium is available at www.echochildren.org.
About The Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
Named to the Top 10 Honor Roll on U.S. News & World Report’s 2023-24 list of “Best Children’s Hospitals,” Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of America’s largest not-for-profit free-standing pediatric health care systems providing unique expertise in pediatric population health, behavioral health, genomics and health equity as the next frontiers in pediatric medicine, leading to best outcomes for the health of the whole child. Integrated clinical and research programs are part of what allows Nationwide Children’s to advance its unique model of care. As home to the Department of Pediatrics of The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Nationwide Children’s faculty train the next generation of pediatricians, scientists and pediatric specialists. The Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of the Top 10 National Institutes of Health-funded free-standing pediatric research facilities in the U.S., supporting basic, clinical, translational, behavioral and population health research. The AWRI is comprised of multidisciplinary Centers of Emphasis paired with advanced infrastructure supporting capabilities such as technology commercialization for discoveries; gene- and cell-based therapies; and genome sequencing and analysis. More information is available at NationwideChildrens.org/Research.