# Air Pollution and Pregnancy Loss

> **NIH NIH R01** · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2020 · $571,768

## Abstract

Project Summary
Miscarriage is the most common pregnancy complication in the United States, occurring in 15-20% of all
clinically recognized pregnancies. It has devastating impacts on both parents, with elevated anxiety and
depressive symptoms in the mother, and even post-traumatic stress disorder, lasting up to a year post-event.
Identification of modifiable risk factors of pregnancy loss, thus, is of great public health importance. Ambient air
pollution is an increasingly recognizable risk factor for pregnancy complications. Although some evidence
exists linking air pollution to pregnancy loss, the need to identify pregnancy loss events through medical
records is a large hurdle in comprehensively assessing this association. For the proposed work, we will employ
a novel approach that uses the outcome metric of live birth-identified conceptions in a variation of the time
series design to overcome this major limitation of all existing studies. To this end, we will use information on all
live births recorded in Denmark between 1997 and 2017, and couple these with highly spatio-temporally
resolved air pollution predictions from well-validated models. Specifically, we will (1) investigate the association
between both particulate matter air pollution exposures, an indicator of the mixture of air pollution, and traffic-
related air pollution, a component of ambient air pollution found to be especially toxic for pregnancy
complications, and pregnancy loss; (2) identify the critical windows of vulnerability; (3) develop novel
methodology to assess potential effect modification by multiple modifiers simultaneously while incorporating
the highly resolved time-varying exposures during gestation; and (4) identify maternal- and neighborhood-level
effect modifiers, and therefore, the most susceptible subpopulations to air pollution impacts. Our findings can
greatly inform targeted regulations and policies, crafting of public health messages, and targeted interventions.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9885935
- **Project number:** 1R01ES029943-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $571,768
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-08-06 → 2025-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9885935

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9885935, Air Pollution and Pregnancy Loss (1R01ES029943-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9885935. Licensed CC0.

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