Impact of Environmental Exposures on Maternal and Child Health: Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2027 | Viewed by 384
Editors
2. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Interests: epidemiology; environmental health; nutrition; pregnancy; obesity; chronic disease; pediatrics and maternal/child health; prevention
Interests: exposure science and environmental epidemiology; cardiovascular health; hypertension; maternal and child health; metabolomics and proteomics
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Forty years ago, in 1986, Dr. David Barker and his colleagues published their seminal work linking early-life nutrition to adult heart disease, providing important epidemiologic evidence for what later became known as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis. Today, in 2026, we have new opportunities to examine how environmental exposures shape maternal and child health across the course of life. Pregnancy and early childhood represent sensitive windows of susceptibility during which chemical, physical, social, and behavioral exposures may influence maternal health and children’s long-term development. Understanding these early-life influences is essential for advancing public health and protecting future generations.
This Special Issue highlights research conducted within the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. Supported by the National Institutes of Health since 2016 and now in its tenth year, the ECHO Program brings together more than 180 health care institutions and 1,200 researchers to study how a range of early environmental influences affect maternal and child health.
We invite original research articles, brief reports, reviews, and methodological papers that utilize ECHO data to examine environmental drivers of health across ECHO’s five key outcome areas: (1) Pre-, Peri-, and Postnatal; (2) Upper and Lower Airway; (3) Obesity; (4) Neurodevelopment; and (5) Positive Health. By bringing together findings and investigators from the ECHO Cohort, this collection aims to advance understanding of how environmental factors influence maternal well-being and pediatric outcomes.
Prof. Emily Oken
Dr. Mingyu Zhang
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Publisher’s Notice
As stated above, the central purpose of this Special Issue is to present research from ECHO (environmental influences on child health outcomes) program. Given this purpose, the Guest Editors’ contribution to this Special Issue may be greater than that of standard Special Issues published by MDPI. Further details on MDPI's Special Issue guidelines can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/special_issues_guidelines. The Editorial Office and Editor-in-Chief of Prof. Dr. Paul R. Ward has approved this and MDPI’s standard manuscript editorial processing procedure (https://www.mdpi.com/editorial_process) will be applied to all submissions. As per our standard procedure, Guest Editors are excluded from participating in the editorial process for their submission and/or for submissions from persons with whom a potential conflict of interest may exist. More details on MDPI’s Conflict of Interest policy for reviewers and editors can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark22.
Keywords
- environmental exposure
- maternal health
- child health
- prenatal exposure delayed effects
- cohort studies
- child development
- pediatric obesity
- respiratory system
- health status
- neurodevelopment
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