Studies Of Air Pollution, Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes And Child Development In LA:  Overcoming Challenges in Exposure Assessment, Selection Bias, and Confounder Control

Dr. Beate Ritz is a Professor and Vice Chair of the Epidemiology Department and holds co-appointments in the Environmental Health department at the UCLA School of Public Health and in Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine; she is a member of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (COEH), the Southern California Environmental Health Science Center (SCEHSC), and co-directs the NIEHS-funded UCLA Center for Gene-Environment Studies of Parkinson’s disease.

Abstract:  For more than 15 years, our research team has conducted epidemiologic studies of prenatal exposures to air pollution assessing its influence on adverse pregnancy outcomes and subsequent child development and health. The relatively short period during which the fetus develops in utero provides unique opportunities to study the influence of exposures that vary not only spatially but also over time (i.e. seasonally).  The availability of complete birth registration data and dense ambient air monitoring system for criteria pollutants and air toxics provides unique opportunities and methodologic challenges for epidemiologic studies.  I will discuss results from our studies of children born in LA in the past 20 years in terms of the challenges presented by different exposure assessment methods (air monitoring data, land use regression modeling, personal monitoring) and multiple co-exposures, multiple adverse outcomes (birth defects, preterm births, low weight, ultrasound measures of fetal growth, and autism) and data sources (birth records, Dept. of Development Services records, investigator initiated surveys).  Specifically, I will highlight methods and data we employed to assessed and control for confounding and selection biases as well exposure misclassification, exposure patterns, and multiple co-exposures.
Presented by The California Center for Population Research