Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Awarded $95 Million NIH Grant

Newswise — The National Institutes of Health today announced that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, along with the research firm RTI International, will receive a seven-year, $95 million grant to analyze the data from its new Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program, an initiative designed to understand how the environment influences health beginning in the womb. Poised to be the premier study of child health, the ECHO program will capitalize on existing groups, or cohorts, of more than 50,000 children from across the United States to initially focus on four areas: obesity; airway conditions such as asthma and allergies; neurodevelopment, including diseases such as autism; and prenatal and postnatal outcomes, such as birth defects. As ECHO’s Data Analysis Center, the Bloomberg School will lead the data analysis for ECHO, while RTI will lead the data management. The grant – which will be $5 million in the first year – is part of $157 million in 2016 awards to many institutions announced today. “Everything around us may affect the health of children,” says Lisa Jacobson, ScD, a professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School who will lead the Center. “By understanding the impact of environmental exposures that occur during pregnancy through early childhood as well as how they interact with societal factors, behavior and genetics, we can better understand what factors promote a healthy childhood and adolescence.” Experiences during sensitive developmental windows, including around the time of conception, later in pregnancy, and during infancy and early childhood, can have long-lasting effects on the health of children. These experiences encompass a broad range of exposures, from air pollution and chemicals in our neighborhoods, to societal factors such as stress, to individual behaviors like sleep and diet. The grant comes on the heels of the announcement last week of a $300 million gift to the Bloomberg School from businessman and former three-term mayor of New York City Michael R. Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies. The gift will fund the Bloomberg American Health Initiative, designed to help set the nation’s domestic public health agenda and will focus on five areas: addiction and overdose, risks to adolescent health, environmental challenges, obesity and the food system, and violence. “This new grant from the National Institutes of Health dovetails perfectly with the work we are doing to develop innovative solutions to the health threats facing the United States in the 21st century,” says Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH ’87, dean of the Bloomberg School. “We are proud to be able to use our expertise in using data-driven approaches to analyzing large public health problems to help investigate how exposure to a range of environmental factors in early development influences the health of children and adolescents.” M. Danielle Fallin, PhD, who chairs the Bloomberg School’s Department of Mental Health and directs its Wendy Klag Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities, and Heather E. Volk, PhD, an assistant professor of mental health at the School, will work on another part of the ECHO program, it was announced yesterday. They are members of a team of autism researchers led by Drexel University that will use new technology to study the baby teeth of children who have siblings with autism — considered high-risk already — to determine if they’re more likely to develop the disorder if exposed to chemicals in the womb. They hope to determine whether prenatal exposure to these chemicals increase the risk of autism, chemicals that would remain present in teeth well into childhood. The study will focus on children with older siblings who were diagnosed with autism, since they already present a much higher rate of developing autism (roughly one in five are diagnosed, compared to the national average of one in 68). The team will study a group of 1,713 subjects called the Autism Spectrum Disorder Enriched Risk (ASD-ER) cohort. In this cohort, there are 1,281 children who are considered “high risk” because of their older sibling’s autism diagnosis, and 432 children called “low risk” because they lack a sibling with autism.