Data Analysis Conducted by Emmes Contributed to New NIH Research Linking Air Pollution to Preterm Birth Risks in Mothers with Asthma

The Emmes Corporation today announced that it contributed to a landmark research study by the National Institutes of Health linking air pollution and preterm birth risk in pregnant women with asthma. The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, reported that pregnant women with asthma have an increased risk for preterm birth when exposed to high levels of nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, common traffic-related air pollutants.

The study found that exposure to nitrogen oxide, for example, in the three months prior to conception, increased preterm birth risk by nearly 30 percent for women with asthma compared to 8 percent for women without asthma.

The company’s work on this study initially began with a project for the Consortium on Safe Labor, in which an Emmes team conducted statistical analysis on more than 223,000 records of pregnant women. The data, spanning six years, were subsequently merged with air pollution data generated from a modified computational tool called the Community Multi-scale Air Quality Modeling System available from the Environmental Protection Agency. The goal was to determine whether there was a relationship between levels of air pollutants and pregnancy outcomes.