# Longitudinal Neural Imaging and Functional Resilience After Hurricane Harvey

> **NIH NIH R21** · BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE · 2020 · $802,801

## Abstract

Pregnancy and early life represent crucial windows of susceptibility to environmental exposures and stress,
increasing the risk of the offspring for behavioral disorders in childhood, including an increased susceptibility to
anxiety. Epigenomic, metagenomic and metabolomic changes are likely key molecular mediators of these
increased risks. Our team has spent the past decade identifying and describing these molecular mediators
which are associated with an adverse in utero environment, including the use of large scale multi’omics data
sets to relate them to behavior in early childhood and adolescence.
 We have found that composite maternal and neonatal morbidities were increased after Harvey landfall
(“Hurricane Harvey exposed”) compared with individuals who delivered before Harvey (“Harvey unexposed).
These adverse events were more common in pregnant women who answered positively to being directly
affected by the hurricane, but did not vary by perceived stress. Thus, measures of stress and resilience
following hurricane exposure, and how this potentially affects neurobehavioral outcomes and resilience in the
children of these pregnant women, had not yet been studied and is the goal of this current proposal.
 We are very excited about our capacity and readiness to conduct this study on an aggressive 1 year
timeline as outlined by our aims. We will leverage our existing and highly-characterized cohort of subjects who
were pregnant at the time of Hurricane Harvey. From these subjects we have already sequenced maternal
samples (placental, vaginal, oral, stool, and breastmilk) and infant specimens (stool and oral) for
metagenomics analyses. We propose to follow-up on the children of this cohort, to continue the metagenomic,
metabolomic and epigenomic studies afforded by the collection of these samples before, during and after
Harvey. We propose to collect oral swabs and stool from these children, and perform behavioral and
neuroimaging assessments at 4 years of age to determine the biologic signature of in utero exposure to
Hurricane Harvey and resultant neurobehavior with this exposure. By integrating exposure measures from our
existing, placental, neonatal and infant samples with accompanying robust clinical metadata, longitudinal
metagenomic, epigenomic and metabolomic data, then integrating behavioral and neurostructural imaging
data, we will be able inform and predict attributable risk. Having spent over a decade identifying both exposure
risks and molecular mechanisms underlying the developmental origins of disease, we are uniquely poised to
rapidly expand and integrate this data in our post-Harvey setting in an ongoing cohort with studies which are
scientifically rigorous, feasible, justifiable, and of likely long-term significance and high translational impact.
Follow-up of this existing cohort will provide an invaluable resource to the scientific community by making
available large scale data sets on 200 subjects which include metagenomics, m...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10155165
- **Project number:** 3R21ES029462-02S1
- **Recipient organization:** BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE
- **Principal Investigator:** Kjersti Marie Aagaard
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $802,801
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2020-08-01 → 2022-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10155165

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10155165, Longitudinal Neural Imaging and Functional Resilience After Hurricane Harvey (3R21ES029462-02S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10155165. Licensed CC0.

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