Lebanon
The grants from the National Institutes of Health are part of a nationwide, $157 million initiative called Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes that focuses on how exposure to metals, chemicals, air pollution and other factors might impact respiratory health and development, obesity, and the development of brain function and the nervous system, according to a news release from Geisel and D-H officials.
The Geisel/D-H grant will play a critical role in learning more about how young children in rural setttings are affected when exposed to such everyday factors as wood smoke and water from private wells.
“We’re trying to build this very comprehensive picture of children’s exposures and the impact on their health outcomes,” Margaret Karagas, the chairwoman of Geisel’s epidemiology department and the principal investigator for the New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study, said in a phone interview on Thursday.
The New Hampshire Birth Cohort research project, which has been in existence since 2009, will receive up to $40 million over the next seven years to help lead the research.
Another $2 million over four years will go to a team led by Paul Palumbo, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth, to conduct pediatric clinical trials in New Hampshire as part of a national NIH program to build “state-of-the-art pediatric clinical research networks” in rural and medically underserved areas, the release said.
“This initiative will provide a much-needed central coordinating platform for pediatric clinical trials in the Dartmouth community,” Palumbo said in the release.
Karagas said the research she and D-H and Geisel colleagues will conduct includes measuring the effects of environmental contaminants such as metals, including lead, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals by analyzing children’s microbiome, the assemblage of microbes that live in the human body.
The research also will include having pregnant women wear silicone wrist bracelets that can measure up to 1,400 chemicals to help see what their fetuses are being exposed to.
Children in the study also will be monitored by physical activity sensors “so we can measure children in their daily lives and what they experience,” she said.
The study will range from in utero and early life exposure up to age 5, while also tracking health outcomes of children above that age.
Karagas said the program will help leverage more such research in the future.
“It’s a local opportunity, in a sense, to build our research here on children in New Hampshire and Vermont. It’s definitely much-needed research,” she said.
The NHBC already has been studying well water contaminants, such as arsenic, and this will take the project to “a new level,” she said.
It includes studying children’s exposure to contaminants in the air, water, their food and even how much time they sleep or spend outdoors.
Some of the Dartmouth-bound money also will be shared with laboratories in Woods Hole, Mass., which looks at a microbiome analysis, and at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, where a specialty includes metabolomics, measuring thousands of components found in blood.
John Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com.