Friday, July 26, 2024
7/26/2024
ABSTRACT Growing evidence supports that exposures to chemical and non-chemical stressors during the prenatal and early childhood periods adversely affect perinatal and child health, with potential lifelong health consequences for mothers and offspring. In the United States chemical and non-chemical stressor exposures and adverse health outcomes occur disproportionately to African American families, highlighting that disparities begin in utero and become amplified postnatally, and underscoring the importance of representation of this vulnerable population in environmental epidemiology cohort (EEC) research that spans the life course. Among outcomes disproportionately experienced by African American families are adverse perinatal health outcomes (e.g., cardiometabolic complications of pregnancy, preterm birth, small-for- gestational age), neurodevelopmental delays, and obesity – all of which have been linked to environmental exposures yet remain poorly understood, and poorly targeted by preventive measures, due to etiologic complexity, the lack of biomarkers to indicate impactful exposures and/or individual susceptibility, as well as the insufficient engagement of environmental health scientists who share cultural background with members of affected communities in research. With NIH support, our team has established a socioeconomically diverse, well-phenotyped African American maternal-child EEC that enrolls mothers during early pregnancy and extends dyad follow-up through early childhood to investigate prenatal toxicant and stress exposures, along with the microbiome, epigenome, and metabolome, on perinatal and child health outcomes. We have enrolled 700 mother-child dyads. with prenatal toxicant exposures and rates of preterm birth substantially higher than US rates. We have employed cohort data to delineate: the role of prenatal exposures to persistent and non- persistent chemical mixtures and chemical-psychosocial stressor mixtures in adverse birth outcomes; maternal metabolic perturbations that associate with environmental exposures and adverse birth outcomes; the role of maternal adversity in epigenetic age acceleration and emotional reactivity in offspring (highlighting intergenerational impacts of exposure); and growing concern among the community about toxicant exposures from personal care product use. To advance both environmental health science and workforce diversification, we propose to expand: 1) enrollment and longitudinal follow-up of African American mother-child dyads, with enrollment in a key window of susceptibility (pregnancy); 2) data collection to include measures of environmental health equity (area-level deprivation, segregation, air pollution) and environmental injustice (metabolic signatures of bio-transformed metabolites of personal care products used by African American women) for inclusion in analytic models of risk for adverse perinatal health outcomes under the ‘stress- exposure disease’ framework; and 3) engagement with early stage investigators of the Morehouse School of Medicine NIEHS-supported Frontiers in Environmental Science and Health (FrESH) training program.
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