A new pilot research project at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine (WMed) aims to explore the impact of socioeconomic status on placental development and long-term health outcomes for children in Kalamazoo.
The research project, “The Placental Phenotype as a Biomarker of Maternal and Offspring Health and Equity,” is being led by Gerrit J. Bouma, PhD, professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, and Prentiss Jones, PhD, director of Clinical and Forensic Toxicology at WMed and associate professor and chair of the Department of Pathology.
The work is being supported by a WMed Pilot Research Project Support Program grant, awarded earlier this year.
“There is some data available that lead, when it’s in mom during pregnancy, can impact the placenta and get transferred through the placenta, but even more so that it actually can be stored in the placenta,” Dr. Bouma said. “The findings of this study would set up the stage where we can really provide equal healthcare regardless of socioeconomic status.”
While several studies have shown that conditions such as hypertension, coronary heart disease, diabetes, asthma, heart failure, and reduced life span have an association with term placental morphology and phenotype, little is known about a correlation between placental phenotype with overall maternal and offspring health, especially when considering the biological sex of the fetus/offspring, race or ethnicity, and/or socioeconomic status, according to Dr. Bouma.
The purpose of this pilot project is twofold:
- Develop a prototype term placental imaging system that easily, efficiently and accurately can capture placental phenotype, i.e., weight, length, width and thickness, in delivery rooms.
- Demonstrate that term placenta serves as a biochemical reservoir that can be used as a noninvasive biomarker of past maternal exposures as they relate to socioeconomic status.
“A tremendous opportunity exists to obtain novel critical information non-invasively and easily about mom and her offspring from an organ that normally is discarded in the delivery room after childbirth,” Dr. Bouma said. “We can get more data from something that we typically throw away.”
An important second part of this project will include examining the amount of lead in 20 placentas from women in Kalamazoo – 10 from women residing in neighborhoods generally associated with lower socioeconomic status and 10 from women residing in neighborhoods associated with higher socioeconomic status.
“Although this sample size likely is too small to detect any significant correlation between lead content in placentas related to low and high socioeconomic status, the main purpose of this preliminary pilot study is to determine if lead and other chemicals such as opioids can be detected in human placental biopsy samples collected in the Kalamazoo area,” Dr. Bouma said. “This will provide the preliminary data necessary for future grant applications to explore in greater detail the impact of socioeconomic status on placental lead and/or opioid content in a much larger sample size.”
In the last three years, Dr. Jones has conducted close to 3,000 blood lead tests, including many on children residing in Southwest Michigan. Studies have shown higher blood lead levels are often associated with lower IQ scores and higher dropout rates in schools, making early detection of lead all the more important, according to Dr. Jones.
“The sad and unfortunate part about the neurological damage caused by lead poisoning in children is that it’s irreversible,” Dr. Jones said. “If we’re able to identify exposure early on, perhaps there are some measures one can take to remediate problems that will present for children who are exposed to lead in utero.”