ABSTRACT - Enriching a Diverse Pregnancy Cohort from the San Francisco Bay Area to Expand Data
Access and Individual Results Return on Environmental Exposures to Participant Communities
We seek to expand our Chemicals in Our Bodies (CIOB) pregnancy cohort at University of California, San
Francisco (UCSF) to enhance the diversity of our study population, integrate new individual and neighborhood
level measures of structural racism and social marginalization, expand environmental chemical exposure
measures, report back individual chemical results to participants, and share accessible and actionable
pregnancy cohort data to diverse end-users. CIOB is a diverse pregnancy cohort of Latina, White, Asian, and
Black participants dedicated to understanding how prenatal exposures to endocrine-disrupting chemicals
(EDCs) and social stressors during pregnancy affect perinatal, maternal health, and neurodevelopmental
outcomes in offspring. With 769 participants, the nine-year-old CIOB pregnancy cohort was launched in the
San Francisco Bay Area as part of our NIEHS/US EPA Children’s Environmental Health Center, and continued
recruitment of pregnant participants and extended follow-up of offspring through seven years old in
collaboration with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as part of the NIH ECHO program. For this grant,
we will enhance the diversity of CIOB by expanding recruitment of Black (N=80) and other pregnant
participants of color (N=70) from Oakland, CA (Total N=150) from a safety net hospital. We will administer our
established surveys and collect biospecimens to increase our cohort size to ~920 participants and measure
~200 chemicals including phthalates and other plasticizers, phenolic compounds, pesticides, and aromatic
amines. We will integrate new neighborhood measures of structural racism and socioeconomic marginalization
to facilitate analyses of the cumulative and joint effects of chemical and social stressor exposures on perinatal
and maternal health outcomes. We will evaluate the relationship between the multiple chemical exposures and
social stressors and their relationship to adverse pregnancy outcomes. We will also make our cohort data
broadly accessible to other researchers including those who wish to leverage banked biospecimens and
expand analyses of prenatal social and environmental chemical exposures via the Vivli platform, an online data
repository. We will use the smartphone Digital Exposure Report Back Interface (DERBI) to report back to
participants their individual chemical exposure results (with aggregate study results, exposure sources, and
strategies for individual and collective approaches to exposure reduction). Development of DERBI will entail
iterative feedback from our participants via usability testing. Analyses using our CIOB cohort will inform clinical
practice, as well as environmental and social policies and interventions to eliminate the double jeopardy of
environmental chemical and social stressor exposures on perinatal and maternal health.
