Grants and Fellowships | 2014

51 Post-Doctoral Fellowships Birth and Childhood Weight and Environmental Exposures Child weight status is an important health outcome. The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of exposures to the environment during pregnancy and child weight status in Israel and in Spain. We evaluated the associations between the built environment and birth weight in an Israeli registry based cohort. Evaluation of the associations between proximity to green spaces and surrounding greenness and birth weight for approximately 40,000 singleton live births in Tel-Aviv was performed. Satellite-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and proximity to major green spaces from OpenStreetMap were used. We observed that an increase in one interquartile range greenness was associated with a statistically significant increase in birth weight (19.2g, 95% CI: 13.3 to 25.1) and decreased risk of low birth weight cases (OR=0.84, 95% CI: 0.78 to 0.90). The findings were consistent with different buffer and green space sizes and stronger associations were observed among cases of lower socioeconomic status. In the Spanish INMA (Infancia y Medio-Ambiente) birth cohort we evaluated the effects of maternal exposure to multiple chemicals on child weight status at age seven. We evaluated associations between pre- and perinatal biomarker concentrations of 27 endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and child weight status in 470 children aged seven, using single and multi-pollutant models. The 27 EDCs measured include: ten phthalate metabolites, bisphenol A, cadmium, arsenic, and lead in two maternal pregnancy urine samples, six organochlorine compounds in maternal pregnancy serum, mercury in cord blood, and six polybrominated diphenyl ether congeners in maternal colostrum. Principal component analysis generated four factors that accounted for 43.4% of the total variance. The organochlorine factor was associated with child weight status and an increased risk for overweight (adj RRs tertile 3 vs 1: 2.59, 95% CI: 1.19, 5.63) and this association was robust to adjustment for other EDCs. Children located in the second tertile of phthalates factor exposure had inverse associations. This study suggests that prenatal exposure to organochlorines is associated with increased risk of overweight in children and that exposure to other EDCs does not confound this association. This work demonstrated the importance prenatal exposures have on children's weight status. Research publications (1) Agay-Shay, K., Peled, A., Crespo, A.V., Peretz, C., Amitai, Y., Linn, S., Friger, M., & Nieuwenhuijsen, M.J. (2014). Green spaces and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 71 (8), 527-528. Fellow Keren Agay-Shay Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology, CREAL, Spain Supervisors Martine Vrijheid, Mark Nieuwenhuijsen and Jordi Sunyer 2013-2014