African-American women are three times more likely to miscarry if they live near freeways or other heavily traveled roadways, a new state study has found.
Counterintuitively, non-smoking pregnant women are also substantially more likely to miscarry if they live near heavy traffic than are smokers who also live near freeways, the study determined.
The study, co-authored by researchers from the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), the state Department of Public Health and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, was based on interviews of nearly 5,000 women in the East Bay Area, Santa Clara and San Bernardino counties as they sought pregnancy care at Kaiser Permanente hospitals. It has been published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a scientific journal.
"This study adds weight to the growing body of evidence that constant, heavy exposure to traffic exhaust significantly increases the risk of reproductive harm," Dr. Joan Denton, OEHHA director, said in a statement. The OEHHA research is the first published study of the effect of residential traffic exposure on the risk of miscarriage, according to Dr. Shelley Green, who led the study.
The survey of residential, medical and pregnancy history was limited to volunteers who were no more than 12 weeks pregnant, about 9 percent of whom had miscarried, which is within the normal statistical range. Researchers related the miscarriages in relation to residential proximity to roads whose average traffic was at least 15,200 vehicles per day.
Pregnant women who lived within 55 yards of busy roads showed a higher rate of miscarriage compared with women who lived further away from roads with heavy traffic. While the association with high traffic raised miscarriage rates by 50 percent for nonsmokers, their smoking neighbors had a 10 percent higher risk of miscarriage as well.
The full study report can be found here.
Latest posts:
About Comments
Reader comments on Sacbee.com are the opinions of the writer, not The Sacramento Bee. If you see an objectionable comment, click the "report abuse" button below it. We will delete comments containing inappropriate links, obscenities, hate speech, and personal attacks. Flagrant or repeat violators will be banned. See more about comments here.