Expanding a Pregnancy Cohort from the San Francisco Bay Area to Improve 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 our study population, expand environmental chemical exposure measures, report back individual chemical results to participants, and share actionable pregnancy cohort data to end-users. CIOB is a pregnancy cohort of Latina, White, Asian, and African American 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 San Francisco 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 expand recruitment into CIOB (Total N=150). 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 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 available 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 for exposure reduction). Development of DERBI will entail iterative feedback from our participants via usability testing. Analyses using our CIOB cohort will inform clinical practice and interventions to eliminate the double jeopardy of environmental chemical and social stressor exposures on perinatal and maternal health.
