Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

The study is aimed at developing a novel, low-cost test for pre-term birth (PTB). The proposal is intended to test and validate the low-cost salivary progesterone as a point-of-care (POC) test for detecting risk of PTBs in rural community settings of India. Offering non-invasive sampling of biological fluid that is easy to collect, the study allows validation of saliva from a large cohort of pregnant women residing in low-resource community settings.

The study aims to assess the effect of depression on pregnancy and develop biomarkers for adverse pregnancy outcomes. It plans to analyze stress outcomes on pregnancy, fetal growth and birth weight. The overall aim of the study is to determine stress biomarkers for early detection of mothers at risk of preterm birth and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) and to develop interventions to reduce stress and reduce adverse birth outcomes.

The project is aimed at building better bio-banks for long-term storage of bio-specimens. It has been planned to enroll a cohort of pregnant women, who are less than 20 weeks of gestation and follow them until delivery to study their vulnerability to environmental, clinical and biological factors. The study will contribute to our understanding of the association of these various factors with preterm birth (PTB).

The proposal attempts to address the lack of a simple, low-cost, prospective biomarker for future short stature or stunting. It aims to validate the use of absolute neutrophil count as a predictor/biomarker for stunting in infants. It has been hypothesized that infants in settings with poor sanitation conditions and associated abnormal inflammation of the gut from infections subsequently have poor absorptions of nutrients and loss of supplements which eventually leads to stunting.

The project intends to identify challenges to accelerate linear growth among infants/children in low-income settings and strategies to overcome them. The study proposes delivery of an integrated package of interventions (nutritional, environmental, WASH and care) during pregnancy and early childhood in a community-based model. Using stratified randomization, the proposal has been designed in a manner that permits the assessment of the impact of these intervention packages when delivered synergistically or independently on the growth and development of the young child.

The study intends to develop an inter-generational intervention to ameliorate neonatal gut microbiota. It is based on the hypothesis that consuming prebiotic starches such as high amylose maize starch (HAMS) by mothers during the third trimester of pregnancy will modify their fecal microbiota and will subsequently lead to a beneficial variation in the fecal microbiota of the newborn infant. This will consequently guide favorable intestinal activity, thus enhancing growth, and intellectual competence of the infant in the intermediate and long term.

With providing compact ultrasound devices, many pregnant women can benefit from prenatal diagnosis.

Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will establish simple touch screens in Kenyan health clinics to gather immediate feedback from young women seeking reproductive and sexual health services on their experience as they leave the clinic. A negative patient experience during a doctor's appointment has a harmful effect on subsequent health decisions.

Alip Borthakur of the University of Illinois at Chicago in the U.S. will characterize the effects of probiotics on epithelial uptake of the fatty acid butyrate in vitro and in a mouse model to inform therapeutic strategies to cure and prevent acute diarrhea and malnutrition in children.

Jennifer Friedman of the Center for International Health Research at Rhode Island Hospital in the U.S. will examine the role that chronic placental and fetal exposure to infectious diseases during gestation plays in low birth weight. This work will form the basis of further studies to identify biomarkers for fetal inflammation in the maternal circulation for possible use in diagnostic tests to identify at-risk pregnancies.