Christy Porucznik: Systematic Collection of Biospecimens in the Periconceptional Period

ECHO Discovery Summary

Traditional studies investigating environmental exposures during pregnancy often recruit women during their first trimester, and as a result these studies exclude data from around the time of conception and create an incomplete and biased understanding of the exposure’s effect. Environmental exposures experienced by both the mother and the father around the time of conception can influence their success in achieving and maintaining a pregnancy.

Christy Porucznik, PhD, MSPH of the University of Utah Health shared an example of how studies can successfully collect data on environmental exposures from before conception. Her presentation discussed the success of the Home Observation of Peri-conceptional Exposures (HOPE) study, which recruited couples who were planning a pregnancy before they conceived.

Dr. Porucznik explained how the HOPE study was able to train women to track their ovulation cycle and have both members of the couple collect regular biospecimen samples throughout that cycle until pregnancy was achieved. Urine, hair, saliva, and semen samples were collected and banked for future studies. The timing of the collection allowed Dr. Porucznik and her team to investigate how certain exposures affected time to pregnancy, sperm count and morphology, and sperm epigenetics—analyses that would all be missed by a traditional environmental exposure study.

Dr. Porucznik also highlighted the potential for ECHO studies sites to specialize in and implement a similar remote preconception protocol to gather more extensive and diverse preconception data. Participants who achieve pregnancy can then be transferred into a traditional ECHO cohort for further follow up.

Speaker:

Christy Porucznik, PhD, MSPH

University of Utah Health

Speaker Bio:

Christy Porucznik, PhD, MSPH, is the President of the Academic Senate at the University of Utah and a professor in the Division of Public Health, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine in the School of Medicine.  She completed graduate training in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. Dr. Porucznik is broadly interested in efficient exposure assessment and research questions that can be easily explained to non-scientists.

Date: Wednesday, November 10th, 1 to 2pm ET