# The ECHO Minnesota Asian American and Pacific Islander Pre-Conception and Pregnancy Cohort

> **NIH NIH UG3** · UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA · 2024 · $2,586,522

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
The Asian population in the U.S. has nearly doubled since the year 2000. Overall, 6.5% of births in the U.S. are
to Asian people, yet a recently published ECHO Cohort analysis of pregnancies indicated that only 5.0% of the
nearly 22,000 pregnancies included were to Asian people, representing just over 1,000 pregnant Asians. Despite
efforts to be inclusive at enrollment across individual cohorts, the ECHO Cohort may include too few pregnant
people of this underrepresented minority group to allow for meaningful examination of important race-related
associations. Concerns about insufficient statistical power are heightened when analyses require disaggregation
of data by Asian ethnicity due to heterogeneous risks. This proposal aims to increase the power and significance
of the ECHO Cohort by enrolling an additional 780 pregnant Asian people representing multiple Asian ethnic
groups from the three largest healthcare systems in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area, along with their
conceiving partners and the index infant. Our institutional expertise supports our focus on physical & chemical
and lifestyle measures for our Specialized Exposures, and obesity as our Specialized Outcome. This study will
allow us to further examine environmental health disparities among Asians, particularly among Southeast Asians
such at the Hmong, who overwhelmingly represent the largest Asian ethnicity in Minnesota. For example,
reproductive-aged Hmong women have been found to have significantly higher levels of certain phthalate
metabolites compared to NHANES averages; given the documented effects of phthalates on fetal development,
this is particularly concerning because Hmong women are roughly twice as likely to have had a birth in the last
year compared to all other women. Our scientific aims will investigate the role of phthalates on sexually dimorphic
outcomes including body composition in Asian ECHO Cohort participants. Our operational aim will use the
exceptional performance of our research team during the first seven years of the ECHO Cohort to enroll multi-
ethnic Asian participants. We will employ a novel recruitment methodology that transcends healthcare systems
and that will identify a pregnant person at their first prenatal visit, then allowing research professionals from their
own healthcare institution to recruit for our cohort. Upon enrollment, our study team will coordinate effortless
biospecimen collection from their routine prenatal visits (and during delivery), while providing in-person (remote
when necessary) study visits at our conveniently located Epidemiology Clinical Research Center; we will retain
our Asian families using community-engaged approaches. Children resulting from the pregnancy, and the
conceiving partner, will also be enrolled. 117 (15%) of these once-pregnant Asian people who may become
pregnant again, along with their conceiving partners, will be re-enrolled into the ECHO Pre-Conception Pilot.
This unprecedented col...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10909371
- **Project number:** 5UG3OD035529-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
- **Principal Investigator:** HONG-NGOC B. NGUYEN
- **Activity code:** UG3 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $2,586,522
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-09-01 → 2025-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10909371

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10909371, The ECHO Minnesota Asian American and Pacific Islander Pre-Conception and Pregnancy Cohort (5UG3OD035529-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10909371. Licensed CC0.

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