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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