Health disparities at the beginning stages of life is focus of NIH-funded study at UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. – A University at Buffalo researcher has received a five-year, $3.4 million grant to begin a study that will examine how parents’ mental health and socio-economic factors impact health disparities at the very beginning stages of life.

The impacts of health disparities are well known, as a tremendous amount of research has been done showing how these inequities affect people’s health from chronic disease to life expectancy, mostly beginning from childhood and extending throughout an individual’s life.

But health disparities in the U.S. originate as early as the prenatal period. Poverty and discrimination in early life generate disparities in health over the lifespan that become further entrenched through their transmission across generations, says Lina Mu, MD, PhD, the principal investigator on the project, which is being funded through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Mu is an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health in UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions.

The UB study aims to fill a gap by investigating socio-economic and racial and ethnic disparities in children’s health and development from birth through the first year of life.

“Pregnancy is a critical time window, and whatever exposures a mother and child experience during this time can have a significant impact,” says Mu.

The study will also examine the socio-economic, racial and ethnic disparities in parents’ mental health and environmental exposures; it will investigate the underlying molecular mechanisms through which the parental exposure may impact both maternal health and child development, such as maternal neuroendocrine-immune and metabolic responses during pregnancy.

“Although disparities in health are well documented, the developmental mechanisms that impact disparities at the very beginning of life are not, particularly those that lead to developmental deficits that emerge long before disease states,” says Mu.

The study will enroll approximately 850 pregnant women as early during their pregnancy as possible, but no later than 12 weeks — two-thirds of whom identify as either Black or Latinx — and about 565 - 600 co-parents, and will follow them and their infants through delivery and the first 12 months of life. Study recruitment is slated to start this spring.

Mu’s collaborators on the study include Jean Wactawski-Wende, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor and dean of the UB School of Public Health and Health Professions (SPHHP); Rebeccah Stevens, MD, clinical assistant professor, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB and a physician with UBMD Obstetrics and Gynecology; Michelle Hartley-McAndrew, MD, clinical associate professor of pediatrics, Jacobs School, and a physician with UBMD Pediatrics; and LuAnne Brown from community partner Buffalo Prenatal and Perinatal Network.

Researchers from Brown University are also part of the study.