Maternal and Infant Environmental Health Riskscape (MIEHR) Research Center

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ABSTRACT Climate change represents an unprecedented public health crisis world-wide with threats that are ever growing, particularly for persons living in coastal locations. Health risks to mothers and children are a particular concern with growing evidence of impacts of elevated temperatures on maternal and child health. Whereas relatively few investigations have explored differential impacts of temperature among Black, Brown, and Indigenous mothers, the evidence for racial/ethnic disparities in perinatal health is overwhelming and disturbingly long-standing. Further, minority and low-income families experience a “double jeopardy” because of exposures to both chemical and non-chemical stressors in multiple environments. To address these inequities, the Maternal and Infant Environmental Health Riskscape (MIEHR) Research Center, an NIMHD/NIEHS/NICHD P50 Center of Excellence on Environmental Health Disparities Research was established to elucidate contributions of the biological, physical, social, and built environments of the environmental riskscape to environmental health disparities in Black and White pregnant women and their infants. The MIEHR Center has two synergistic research projects: Project 1: The Environmental Riskscape, Disasters and Obstetric Outcomes, an epidemiological study to identify race-specific associations between exposures to a mixture of chemicals and place-based stressors and preterm birth and Project 2: Disparities Aware Classifiers for Maternal and Infant Health, a bioinformatics study to develop and validate disparity aware classifiers for preterm birth for Black and White women. In support of both projects, we are recruiting women who present for labor and delivery at obstetric hospitals in the Texas Medical Center (TMC), the largest medical center in the world. The TMC is in greater Houston, which has an immensely diverse population in terms of racial/ethnic profiles as well as an economic duality of wealth and poverty. Further, the area experiences extremely hot and humid summers and, with its proximity to the Gulf Coast, is prone to hurricanes and flooding. By leveraging the MIEHR Center infrastructure and building on our prior work applying distributed lag non-linear models (DLNLMs) for modeling exposures that have non-linear and lagged effects, we propose to evaluate associations between rising temperatures and birth weight, a perinatal outcome that increases health risks of infants throughout their life course. The Specific Aims are to: 1) Expand the MIEHR environmental riskscape and compile time series of measurements of temperature and other meteorological variables during pregnancy for study participants; 2) Apply DLNLMs to investigate critical windows of exposure to temperature and birth weight; and 3) Examine whether maternal age, race, and place-based stressors modify associations between elevated temperature and birthweight. Results will lay the groundwork for including climate hazards as a critical element of the environmental riskscape in current MIEHR Center research projects and, in a new analysis, identify susceptible windows of exposure to high temperatures on birthweight that will inform efforts to protect pregnant women from heat exposure in the future.