Grants and Fellowships | 2014

57 Doctoral Fellowships Congenital Malformations and Associations with Ambient Air Pollution in Israel, 2000-2006 The main aim of our study was to evaluate the association between maternal exposures to air pollution and ambient temperature during pregnancy and congenital malformations (CM) risk in Israeli women. On the national level, ecological analyses for the total of 1,000,000 births (live births, stillbirths, late abortions and CM) were conducted. All maternal addresses were geocoded. Socio- demographic risk factors and non-random patterns in time and space were evaluated using Poisson trend harmonic method, LISA and SaTScan. The analyses were conducted for 45 CM sub-groups. In a retrospective cohort from the Tel Aviv area we analyzed the associations between CMs thought to be related to environmental factors, mainly congenital heart defects (CHD), and maternal exposure to ambient air pollution and ambient temperature during weeks 3-8 of pregnancy. We found that maternal exposure to increased concentrations of PM 10 and ambient temperature during the winter was associated with increased risk for multiple CHD. Results for PM 10 confirm results from previous studies. Results for ambient temperature are novel. Research publications (1) Agay-Shay, K., Friger, M., Linn, S., Peled, A., Amitai,Y., & Peretz, C. (2012). Periodicity and time trends in the prevalence of total births and conceptions with congenital malformations among Jews and Muslims in Israel, 1999-2006: A time series study of 823,966 births. Birth Defects Research Part A: Clinical and Molecular Teratology, 94 (6), 438-448. (2) Agay-Shay, K., Amitai, Y., Peretz, C., Linn, S., Friger, M., & Peled, A. (2013). Exploratory spatial data analysis of congenital malformations (CM) in Israel, 2000–2006.  ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2 (1), 237-255. (3) Agay-Shay, K., Friger, M., Linn, S., Peled, A., Amitai, Y., & Peretz, C. (2013). Air pollution and congenital heart defects. Environmental Research, 124 , 28-34. (4) Agay-Shay, K., Friger, M., Linn, S., Peled, A., Amitai, Y., & Peretz, C. (2013). Ambient temperature and congenital heart defects. Human Reproduction, 28 (8), 2289-2297. The research focuses on the short term effects of meteorological, vehicular NO x air pollution (VNAP) and socioeconomic (SES) factors on daily hospitalization rates of respiratory (RD) and ischemic heart diseases (IHD) in Beer Sheva during the years 2003-2007. While the association between meteorology and health effects has been extensively studied, findings regarding the relationship between VNAP exposure and health outcomes are still controversial and subject to debate. Our aim was to investigate the association between VNAP exposure, meteorological and SES factors and daily hospitalizations for IHD and RD. Significant spatio-temporal variations of NO x were found within Beer Sheva. Vehicular NO x was associated with daily hospitalizations for RD and IHD. Mean daily temperature and relative humidity were found to be associated with acute RD in the young age group (0-14) and chronic RD and IHD in the elderly (65+). SES was associated with daily hospitalizations by season for RD and IHD. The highest daily hospitalizations for all seasons were found in the lowest SES level for RD and in the medium SES level for IHD. Fellow Keren Agay-Shay University of Haifa Supervisors Shai Linn, Amatzia Peled and Chava Peretz 2008-2011 Fellow Aliza Drory Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Supervisors Dan Blumberg and Michael Friger 2008-2011 Study of the Relationship between Spatial Dispersion of Ischemic Heart Diseases and Respiratory Diseases and Meteorological, Vehicular Air Pollution and Socio-Economic Factors in Israel's Negev Region