# Understanding Risk Gradients from Environment on Native American Child Health Trajectories: Toxicants, Immunomodulation, Metabolic syndromes, & Metals Exposure

> **NIH NIH UH3** · UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO HEALTH SCIS CTR · 2020 · $320,875

## Abstract

Project Summary
Available knowledge about how stress in the home environment influences child neurodevelopment points to
the importance of capturing time-sensitive data on major stressors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, across
the many populations represented in ECHO. The collective ECHO data offers insight into an unfortunate
natural experiment on how such a major stress affects ECHO children and families. Understanding this will
allow for better preparation to meet the needs of affected children as they re-enter school and community life,
while helping to mitigate the impacts of similar stressors in future disasters affecting children. Minority and
marginalized populations are representative of US population prevalence in ECHO, but the total number of any
group within the 55,000 ECHO children may still be relatively small. For example, most Native American ECHO
participants are in 2 cohorts, and represent fewer than 1500 of the 55,000 children in ECHO. It is conceivable
that time-sensitive measures such as responses to ECHO will be captured in very few, or none, of the ECHO
participants within marginalized populations most affected.
This ECHO NOSI application examines the relative pandemic-induced stress across multiple cohorts differing
with respect to marginalization, COVID-19 population prevalence, and experience with historical
trauma/systemic racism. At present, this comparison includes the Navajo Birth Cohort Study/ECHO
(NBCS/ECHO) cohort, the PASS ECHO cohorts (Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in South
Dakota), and the Atlanta ECHO cohort of urban Black participants. We propose three aims to address our
overall hypothesis that pandemic-induced stress will be greatest in populations experiencing the greatest rates
of infection and mortality, but exacerbated by historical trauma in Indigenous and Black populations. Aim 1 will
ensure availability of time-sensitive data to test this hypothesis in the future; Aim 2 will expand the
opportunities for remote and lay staff collection of neurodevelopmental data to ensure availability for testing the
hypothesis, and Aim 3 will test and develop a reliable system for transfer of NBCS data to the DAC NBCS
portal at greater frequency than is currently possible with infrastructure limits.
This is the first study exploring the impact of increased stress across communities already affected by historical
trauma and facing a disaster like COVID-19 to address whether collective stress affects long-term child
neurodevelopment through changes in parenting and the home environment, and will ensure minority cohorts
are represented in the time-sensitive datasets in sufficient numbers to evaluate and compare impacts to
develop mitigation interventions, rather than simply by population proportional representation.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10205869
- **Project number:** 3UH3OD023344-04S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO HEALTH SCIS CTR
- **Principal Investigator:** Johnnye L Lewis
- **Activity code:** UH3 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $320,875
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2016-09-21 → 2023-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10205869

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10205869, Understanding Risk Gradients from Environment on Native American Child Health Trajectories: Toxicants, Immunomodulation, Metabolic syndromes, & Metals Exposure (3UH3OD023344-04S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10205869. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*