The urban exposome and pregnancy complications

Previous studies have associated a number of urban related environmental factors during pregnancy with pregnancy complications (gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes). However, studies applying “ExWAS” analyses to simultaneously consider the urban exposome on these outcomes have been limited. To our knowledge, only one previous study has assessed the relationship between the urban exposome with preeclampsia and gestational hypertension in Florida, USA. The analysis did not distinguish between hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and preeclampsia, and may have suffered from small contrasts across exposure variables due to being conducted in a single geographic region (Hu et al., 2020). No analyses examining relationships between the urban exposome and gestational diabetes have been conducted to our knowledge.

We aim to study the association between the urban exposome and gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes, by leveraging harmonized data across several large European birth cohorts.

This will be the first multi-cohort European study of the urban exposome and pregnancy complications. We will consider air pollutants, green and blue spaces, noise, the built environment, social context, traffic, noise, unhealthy food environments, and meteorological variables in analyses.