Grant allows UMass professor to study air pollution and reproductive health - MassLive.com
Grant allows UMass professor to study air pollution and reproductive health - masslive.com
Carrie Nobles, an assistant professor in the University of Massachusetts School of Public Health and Health Sciences, will continue her research on the impact of air pollution on women’s reproductive health.
Thanks to a two-year, $650,000 grant funded by the National Institutes of Health, Nobles will try to find out details about how pollutants from sources such as power plants and vehicular traffic may lower fertility and which women may be most affected.
The epidemiologist’s work, UMass said in a statement, will hopefully shed light on pollution standards and how to improve reproductive health.
Nobles has conducted research on how air pollution broadly affects a population’s fertility, but those studies were smaller in scale.
“Around the time of ovulation and also around the time of implantation of the embryo, exposure during those points to higher levels of air pollution does seem to relate to a lower probability of getting pregnant and also a higher risk of pregnancy loss,” Nobles said about findings from previous studies. “But there are very few studies that have this fine detailed information on the timing of things like ovulation, the earliest possible detection of pregnancy and, potentially, a pregnancy loss. So, we will be able to look at these acute exposures that are hard to detect.”
Nobles will use findings from a previously conducted study, called the Effects of Aspirin in Gestation and Reproduction, which examined the effects of low-dose aspirin on live-birth rates. She hypothesizes that the air pollution’s impacts on women who took low-dose aspirin will be lower than its impact on those who didn’t.
Related Knowledge Center: Air emissions
More than 30 years after the last major update of the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Supreme Court has upended the ability of Congress to give the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies broad scope to combat air pollution, including the emission of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, further Biden administration efforts to limit emissions face opposition in the courts.