Influence of the Urban Exposome on Birth Weight

Background: We aimed to evaluate the association of the urban exposome with birth weight and term low birth weight.Methods: We estimated exposure to the urban exposome, including the built environment, air pollution, noise, meteorology and natural space (corresponding to 75 exposure variables covering 30 exposure groups ) for nearly 32,000 pregnant women from 6 European birth cohorts. We used two different statistical methods to evaluate possible associations with either continuous birth weight or term low birth weight risk: an exposure-by-exposure method accounting for multiple hypotheses testing, the so called exposure wide association studies (ExWAS) and one method Deletions-Substitution-Addition (DSA), algorithm accounting for correlated exposures.Results: The most consistent statistically significant associations across the statistical analyses were for green space estimated as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) with birth weight and term low birth weight (an increase in birth weight with ...