# Mount Sinai ECHO site for Perinatal  Environment and Development Studies

> **NIH NIH UG3** · ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI · 2024 · $5,463,061

## Abstract

Although a range of prenatal exposures have been linked to adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes,
associations with early neurobehavioral factors related to lifetime psychopathology risk are less well studied.
Internalizing problems, most notably anxiety and depressive disorders, affect >400 million people globally with
a sharp rise in these disorders in childhood and during/after the transition to adolescence. Identifying early risk
and resiliency factors for internalizing disorders is critical to designing and implementing effective interventions
to lessen their health burden. Interactions among environment, genes, sex, and life stage influence normal and
maladaptive development. Starting in utero, the central nervous system (CNS) develops sequentially, with
specific processes and network components of distinct functional domains (e.g., attention, emotion regulation)
developing in a timed order; thus, effects of toxins depend on exposure timing as well as dose. Sex-specific effects
also exist. Moreover, pregnant women and children are exposed to complex mixtures of chemicals as well as
social stressors that co-vary and interact with each other. Differences in exposures in part drive health
inequities because toxic environmental factors are not randomly distributed, but are often concentrated in
segregated communities of color. The complexity in environmental neuroprogramming has not been fully
assessed due to a lack of sufficiently large populations with the requisite longitudinal assessments,
biosampling, and population diversity that would enable joint consideration of a number of environmental
determinants through a developmental health equity lens. Herein, we expand our site's work with the national
ECHO program to elucidate the role of complex mixtures (ambient air pollutants (APs), metals, stress, and
nutritional exposures) starting in utero, in the programming of internalizing problems that emerge over
childhood using a transdiagnostic framework. We will assess transdiagnostic (TD) dimensional features across
select Research Domain Criteria (RDoC): (1) negative valence systems, (2) cognitive systems, and (3)
arousal/regulation. We build upon methods our team developed via 3 awarded ECHO Opportunity for
Infrastructure Funding (OIF) grants that will allow researchers to more fully capitalize on the large diverse
sample, life course framework, and exposure data that ECHO provides. We will implement and disseminate
methodological advances through collaborative ECHO science including: 1) satellite remote sensing AP
models that reconstructpast exposure timing and dose; 2) novel high dimensional mixture statistics; 3)
statistical methods to characterize windows of vulnerability and enhance power to detect complex interactions
among chemicals, stress, nutrition and susceptibility factors (e.g., sex, race/ethnicity); and 4) methods to
evaluate the combinability of ECHO cohort data to optimize discovery and replication. As the complex
exposures cons...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10908622
- **Project number:** 5UG3OD023337-09
- **Recipient organization:** ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI
- **Principal Investigator:** KECIA Nicole CARROLL
- **Activity code:** UG3 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $5,463,061
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-09-21 → 2025-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10908622

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10908622, Mount Sinai ECHO site for Perinatal  Environment and Development Studies (5UG3OD023337-09). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10908622. Licensed CC0.

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