Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

In 2017, Julie Carré, Nicolas Gatimel, Jessika Moreau, Jean Parinaud, and Roger Léandri published “Does Air Pollution Play a Role in Infertility?: a Systematic Review,” hereafter “Does Air Pollution Play a Role,” in the journal Environmental Health. The authors completed a systematic literature review to investigate the effects of air pollutants on fertility in exposed populations. Since air quality has an impact on overall health as well as on reproductive function, the authors sought to increase the awareness of the importance of environmental protection issues among the general public and the authorities. The article “Does Air Pollution Play a Role” provided the foundation for further research on how air pollution can contribute to low reproductive capacity in areas with high exposure.

In September 2003, Robert L. Goldenberg and Cortney Thompson published the article “The Infectious Origins of Stillbirth” in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. In the article, the authors conducted a literature review of articles from the US National Library of Medicine database to review the relationship between perinatal infections, which are infections around the time of birth, and the occurrence of stillbirth. Stillbirth is the death of a fetus in the uterus after at least twenty weeks of pregnancy. Infectious disease can cause or increase the risk of stillbirth in several ways, by causing illness in the pregnant person, damaging the placenta, or directly infecting the fetus. Infectious agents can be viruses, bacteria, or protozoa. Rates of infectious disease and stillbirth are both higher in developing than in developed countries, and the authors state that stillbirth due to infectious disease is also higher. “The Infectious Origins of Stillbirth” provides a comprehensive review of the information available on how infections can lead to stillbirth, providing a foundation for further research.

In the early 2000s, Richard S. Legro, Mark V. Sauer, Gilbert L. Mottla, Kevin S. Richter, William C. Dodson, and Duanping Liao studied the relationship between air pollution and reproductive complications. In the United States, Legro’s team tracked thousands of women undergoing in vitro fertilization, or IVF, along with the air quality of both the IVF clinics and patients’ home locations. IVF is a reproductive technology during which a physician obtains mature eggs from a patient’s ovaries and fertilizes them with sperm in a lab setting outside of the body, after which the physician transfers the fertilized eggs into the patient’s uterus. As stated in Legro’s publication, Legro suspected that poor air quality would adversely affect live birth rates during IVF, so he compiled and analyzed the various types of pollutants that IVF patients were naturally exposed to in their homes and clinics. Legro’s experiment led to an increased awareness among patients about the dangers of conceiving via IVF in highly polluted areas.

In December 2011, the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network, or SCRN, published the article “Causes of Death Among Stillbirths” in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors of the article investigate the causes of stillbirth and possible reasons for the racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities in stillbirth rates. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, stillbirth is the death of a fetus at twenty or more weeks during pregnancy. “Causes of Death Among Stillbirths” explores the common causes of stillbirth in different racial and ethnic groups, and provides a framework for future research into medical interventions to help reduce racial and ethnic stillbirth disparity.

In April 1994, Elizabeth Raymond, Sven Cnattingius, and John Kiely published “Effects of Maternal Age, Parity, and Smoking on the Risk of Stillbirth” in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, now known as BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The article examines how advanced maternal age, defined as delivery at thirty-five years old or older, cigarette smoking, and nulliparity, or the state of never having given birth, can negatively impact pregnancy. At the time of publication, according to Raymond and colleagues, stillbirths comprised over half of all perinatal, or close to birth, deaths and more than one-third of total fetal and infant deaths in Europe and North America. In the article, Raymond and her coauthors demonstrate how certain risk factors may increase the risk of stillbirth at different stages of pregnancy, which helped set a foundation for future research in interventions to prevent stillbirth.