Memorial, Women & Infants to receive $11.1M to study health, development of children

PROVIDENCE – Memorial Hospital and Women & Infants Hospital have received grant funds from the National Institutes of Health, as part of an NIH national initiative called Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes.
On Sept. 21, NIH announced the $157 million ECHO national grant that, over seven years, will study the impact of a multitude of factors – including chemical and air pollution exposure, stress, parenting, sleep and diet – on the health and development of children and adolescents.

“Every baby should have the best opportunity to remain healthy and thrive throughout childhood,” NIH Director Dr. Francis S. Collins said in a statement. “ECHO will help us better understand the factors that contribute to optimal health in children.”

A critical component of ECHO will be to use the NIH-funded Institutional Development Awards program to build state-of-the-art pediatric clinical research networks in rural and medically underserved areas, so that children from these communities can participate in clinical trials. Nationally, ECHO aims to enroll more than 50,000 children.

Memorial Hospital and Women & Infants Hospital initially received two-year grants of $6.2 million and $4.9 million, respectively. After ECHO’s feasibility stage is completed, additional funding – for the last five years of the grant – is expected to be available, a Care New England statement reported.

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At Memorial, Dr. Viren D’Sa, Memorial’s pediatrician-in-chief and the principal research investigator, will work with Sean Deoni, an adjunct professor at Brown University’s School of Engineering and a neuroimaging physicist at the University of Colorado.

They will draw on information gathered from some 1,100 children enrolled in two ongoing studies – one at Memorial Hospital and Brown University, which has followed children since 2010 under a previous NIH grant, and another in Colorado, which has enrolled pregnant mothers. Combined, these studies sought to examine pre- and post-natal influences shaping pediatric development.

The research will track the children’s performance in many functional domains, including academic progress, said D’Sa, who is also an associate professor of pediatrics at The Warren Alpert School of Medicine. “By understanding how and when this diverse array of influences impact brain growth and ultimately affect childhood outcomes … we hope to identify predictors of such outcomes and learn how interventions can be optimized …,” he said.

At Women & Infants, Barry M. Lester, director of the hospital’s Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, and Carmen Marsit, formerly of Women & Infants/Brown and now a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, are the principal investigators for their project, “Environmental Influences of Neurodevelopmental Outcome in Infants Born Very Preterm.”

This grant will enable Lester, who is also a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at The Warren Alpert School of Medicine, and his colleagues to enhance their ongoing work through an existing study that aims to learn how early detection of neurobehavior can identify which infants are most likely to suffer later developmental impairment and identify interventions to combat those deficits.

The grants to Memorial and Women & Infants are in addition to $1.9 million that NIH awarded to Hasbro Children’s Hospital last week. Hasbro will focus on these pediatric outcomes: upper and lower airway; obesity; pre-, peri- and post-natal outcomes and neurodevelopment. Dr. Phyllis Dennery, pediatrician-in-chief at Hasbro, will lead the research there, with additional support from Dr. Thomas Chun, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Hasbro, and Dr. Abbot Laptook, medical director of Women & Infants Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.

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