NIH awards $5.3 million to Montefiore team to study effect of chemicals in NICUs

Judy Aschner, physician-in-chief at The Children's Hospital at Montefiore, and professor of pediatrics, Michael Cohen, University Chair at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, have been awarded $5.3 million from the National Institutes of Health as part of a seven-year initiative called Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes. The grants will fund researchers' investigations into a broad range of environmental exposures that can impact children's long-term health.

Specifically, Aschner's research will focus on how exposure to chemicals in neonatal intensive care units, such as phthalates -- which are used in plastic medical equipment -- are associated with adverse health outcomes.

Aschner is a nationally recognized physician-scientist and neonatologist. Her research study, "Developmental Impact of NICU Exposures," will examine how children's lung function, cognitive and motor development, growth and onset of puberty are affected by environmental exposures in NICUs.

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Previous research published by Aschner has shown that critically ill newborns who receive intravenous nutritional supplements in the NICU are exposed to 100 times the daily amount of manganese, an essential trace metal, than babies receiving a human milk diet; that could contribute to the risk of adverse health and behavioral health outcomes later in life.

Building off this research, Aschner's team will now measure the impact of NICU-based phthalate exposure and stress exposures at ages three to 10, in addition to further investigating the effect of manganese on neurodevelopmental outcomes in prematurely-born children.

Aschner will collaborate with Susan Teitelbaum, an environmental epidemiologist and co-principal investigator, and Annemarie Stroustrup, a neonatologist and co-investigator at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. They'll join co-investigators around the country to recruit approximately 1,000 children at 15 geographically diverse clinical sites who were born prematurely and were cared for in a neonatal intensive care unit after birth.

"Each year, more than 300,000 preterm infants in the United States are admitted to NICUs, where they are exposed to a chemical-intensive hospital environment," said Aschner in a statement. "The outstanding care provided in NICUs throughout the country allows many critically ill babies to grow, thrive and go home with their families. However, it is crucial that we gain a better understanding of the long-term effects of exposure to various environmental factors, to help ensure children have the best health possible throughout the rest of their lives."

The grant, which will fund the first two years of the research program, is part of $157 million awarded by the NIH to researchers in fiscal year 2016. A critical component of ECHO will be to use the NIH-funded Institutional Development Awards program to build modern pediatric clinical research networks in rural and medically underserved areas, so that children from these communities can participate in clinical trials.

Twitter: @JELagasse