Stress & Resilience

From the city to the cell: neighborhood determinants of adverse birth outcomes
Lara Cushing, San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA
Racial disparities in adverse birth outcomes such as preterm and low weight births are not fully explained by known maternal risk factors such as smoking or socioeconomic status, leading to calls for more research on the role of neighborhood-level factors, including environmental pollutants and psychosocial stressors which often co-occur in disadvantaged neighborhoods. A lack of cohort studies with robust measures of both environmental and social stressors has hindered efforts to understand their joint effects on perinatal health. This 2-year project will leverage data from an existing cohort of pregnant women from California to create a unique dataset of prenatal measures of 1) neighborhood-level built and social environment characteristics (greenspace, noise, and crime), 2) exposure to traffic, 3) individual-level perceptual and biomarker psychosocial stress measures, and 4) birth outcome data to evaluate the cumulative effects of traffic-related exposures and psychosocial stressors on the length of gestation and fetal growth. Outcomes will include at least three peer-reviewed publications contributing new knowledge regarding neighborhood determinants of adverse birth outcomes.