Why this matters:
- Environmental factors, such as pollution and nutrition, can have negative impacts on pregnancy and child health.
- Researchers are working to understand how these factors affect kids from different backgrounds.
- If funding is significantly reduced, generations of children across the U.S. could be negatively affected.
Michigan State University researcher Jean Kerver, a Traverse City-based associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the MSU College of Human Medicine, leads one of the largest National Institutes of Health-funded studies of environmental influences on child health outcomes. She works with families in Michigan to understand a broad range of environmental factors, including air pollution, chemical exposure, inadequate nutrition and others, that may adversely affect pregnancy and child health.
“I think there is a lot that is unknown about children’s development,” said Katie Laatsch, a study volunteer from Kalamazoo. “Taking the time to invest in that with my own child is worth it to me.”
Laatsch traveled to East Lansing with her 2-year-old son to help researchers train to accurately collect data for the ECHO study, which stands for Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes.
More than 2,000 families in Michigan are already enrolled in ECHO — a study created by NIH to improve children’s health for generations to come.
The long-term nationwide program also includes 30 researchers at MSU, the University of Michigan, Wayne State University, Henry Ford Health and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, as well as nearly 20 full-time staff members statewide.
As part of a broad effort to reduce federal spending, the NIH announced a 15% cap on the portion of grants covering facilities and administrative costs, also known as F&A or indirect costs. This represents a significant cut.
University and medical center leaders nationwide have said those cuts and potentially others will devastate biomedical research aimed at preventing diseases and developing better treatments.
“It’s frustrating to know there’s that potential for funding to be cut because there is so much that’s unknown,” Laatsch said. “And there’s so much good that can come from those types of studies for children in different areas across the world.”
For example, an ongoing study headed by Kerver found that one-quarter of pregnant women in mid-Michigan lacked sufficient iodine, a nutrient essential for babies’ brain development. As a result, doctors, including those in rural Michigan, began recommending prenatal supplements that contain iodine because not all prenatal supplements include the chemical element.
That discovery alone can vastly improve the health of children and is just one example of the immediate benefits of medical research, said Kerver.
“It’s important to understand what kinds of things we can change in our environment to optimize child health,” she said.
Kerver and the statewide team of researchers were thrilled in September 2023 when their study received a $26 million federal grant for seven more years of work. In recent weeks, however, their enthusiasm has turned to worry that the federal government might reduce or eliminate funding for the study, which already has produced such significant findings.
Rita Strakovsky, associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition in the MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, also volunteered her time by bringing in her toddler so the research assistants could practice administering the study’s tests. Strakovsky is also an investigator on the study at a site in Illinois.
“We try to really make sure people understand that our ultimate goal is to protect children’s health,” Strakovsky said. “We work to understand factors that impact the ways kids grow and the way that they develop. There are things we still don’t know and, in order to know more, we need to research and to be able to actively find out, not just assume things.”
Proposed budget cuts could halt progress
“Any interruption to our funding will have a devastating effect,” Kerver said. “We already have invested so much in ramping this up that it would be short-sighted and wasteful to interrupt this important longitudinal study.”
She fears the study could grind to a halt if it loses federal funding. The first phase of the 2023 grant ends in May, with $18 million more planned to cover the remaining five years. With the proposed cuts to NIH funding, all of that could be withheld, halting research into the causes of adverse pregnancy outcomes, childhood obesity, asthma and neurodevelopmental disorders.
“The most important thing for people to understand about this research, and science in general, is that we make progress by taking small steps forward,” Kerver said. “We know so many things, but there are also so many things we don’t know. To put a halt to a long-term study like this, especially in ECHO where we’re really trying to understand how combinations of various things in kids’ environments impact their health, would completely interrupt that forward progress and could set us back decades in developing treatments and prevention strategies for a whole variety of childhood disorders like premature birth, asthma, ADHD and obesity.”
The discovery of insufficient iodine levels in some pregnant women is just one of the study’s findings that can lead to a lifetime of better health for children. The study also found that the children of women who had a previous infection with a common virus called cytomegalovirus, or CMV, had higher than average symptoms of autism.
In contrast to the view that federal spending is wasteful, applications for NIH grants are extremely competitive and must undergo an extensive peer review. Only the most promising are awarded NIH grants.
The public may be unaware of the everyday value of medical research and that it can improve their lives in tangible ways by preventing disease and developing better treatments, Kerver said.
“People might not know it, but research doesn’t just happen in labs at universities,” she added. “We partner with communities across the state,” including 11 hospitals and 21 prenatal clinics in Michigan.
“Having these large-scale programs ensures that even when we’re not there, our kids are protected on some level because of some of the research we’ve done to show that maybe something is unsafe or something is critically important for their development,” Strakovsky said.
Research also adds economic benefits
Beyond the health benefits, the study also contributes to Michigan’s economy, Kerver said, adding that much of the additional $18 million in federal funds pays the salaries of staff members who are now working across the state.
Improving children’s health also is a national security imperative, Kerver said, since unhealthy children tend to grow into unhealthy adults, making it harder for the U.S. to compete with other countries.
“We are biased, it’s true,” said Strakovsky. “We chose this public health-facing job. We chose it because we think somebody should be looking out for all the kids. We care about everybody’s kid.”
But the bottom line, Kerver said, is that identifying the causes of poor health in children and developing ways to prevent diseases is simply the right thing to do.“To me, the most important thing is we’re working hard to improve child health,” Kerver said. “I mean, what could be more important than that?”