Maternal Exposure to Indoor Air Pollution and Birth Outcomes

Peter Franklin, Mark Tan, Naomi Hemy and Graham L. Hall
Additional contact information
Peter Franklin: School of Population and Global Health, Faculty of Health and Medicine Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia
Mark Tan: School of Paediatrics and Child Health, Faculty of Health and Medicine Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia
Naomi Hemy: Telethon Kids Institute, Nedlands, WA 6009, Australia
Graham L. Hall: Telethon Kids Institute, Nedlands, WA 6009, Australia

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 8, 1-10

Abstract: There is a growing body of research on the association between ambient air pollution and adverse birth outcomes. However, people in high income countries spend most of their time indoors. Pregnant women spend much of that time at home. The aim of this study was to investigate if indoor air pollutants were associated with poor birth outcomes. Pregnant women were recruited prior to 18 weeks gestation. They completed a housing questionnaire and household chemical use survey. Indoor pollutants, formaldehyde (HCHO), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), were monitored in the women’s homes at 34 weeks gestation. Gestational age (GA), birth weight (BW) and length (BL) and head circumference (HC) were collected from birth records. The associations between measured pollutants, and pollution surrogates, were analysed using general linear models, controlling for maternal age, parity, maternal health, and season of birth. Only HCHO was associated with any of the birth outcomes. There was a 0.044 decrease in BW z-score ( p = 0.033) and 0.05 decrease in HC z-score ( p = 0.06) for each unit increase in HCHO. Although HCHO concentrations were very low, this finding is consistent with other studies of formaldehyde and poor birth outcomes.

Keywords: indoor air pollution; formaldehyde; pregnancy; birth outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/8/1364/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/8/1364/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:8:p:1364-:d:223184

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().