Our project, ECHO Yakima Valley, is a partnership between the University of Washington, GAPPS and the Yakima Valley community aimed at improving the health of local children. We are inviting nearly 1,000 young families in the Yakima area to join this project. This starts with engaging study participants through their prenatal care visits at participating health clinics. If you join us, we’ll ask you to give information about your own health during pregnancy as well as that of your newborn baby, and to continuing doing so as your child grows, develops and learns over the years. Our team has strong ties to communities in the Yakima region, where we’ve completed other studies on mother and child health. Our findings could help improve the health of families in Yakima and beyond.
What we hope to learn
Our scientific goals involve understanding the relationships between various aspects of the environment and child health. Research indicates that chemicals in the environment may interfere with the healthy development of a child, while other environmental factors, like nature and strong communities, may promote children’s health. However, there is still much to be learned about these topics. Our research findings could be the foundation of programs, policies and health care practices that ensure access to healthy environments for all children. We are conducting this study in Yakima specifically because the environment of the Yakima Valley and similar rural communities in the United States is less well understood by scientists.
A small but important part of a much larger effort
Our study in the Yakima Valley is just one of many sites in a very large national study called the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) study. The families who join ECHO Yakima Valley will complete the same study activities as nearly 100,000 parents and children across the United States also participating in ECHO. These study activities will include surveys, study visits for measurements and simple assessments of health, and collection of specimens, such as urine and saliva, which will be examined for evidence of chemical pollutants. Conducting this research in such a large population across the United States should provide enough data to pursue research questions that cannot be answered in smaller studies. While the ECHO families in Yakima will represent a relatively small proportion of the nationwide ECHO study, it is important to include participants from diverse backgrounds, including those living in rural and agricultural regions.
It is important to us to share the results of our study with the Yakima community. We look forward to sharing research findings with the local community in the future on this website, through social media, at local health fairs and in other ways. We will work with community partners including Heritage University and Radio KDNA to share findings.
Funding
Our study is funded by the US National Institutes of Health (UG3OD035528).
Partners
