“Environmental chemicals and midlife women’s health: an environmental reproductive justice lens”
Dr. James-Todd is the Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Reproductive Epidemiology and Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Learn more about this event.
Date + Time: Thursday, September 26, 2024 • 1:00 pm — 2:00 pm
Location: M1020 SPH 2 School of Public Health • 1415 Washington Heights, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2029
“We found that Black and Hispanic women had a higher risk of having surgical menopause... and we found that hypertension occurred about five years earlier, and metabolic outcomes such as diabetes and insulin resistance about 11 years earlier for Black and Hispanic women versus white women.’”
“It’s a time that women have to advocate very strongly for themselves so that their symptoms are not ignored. What’s important is that you feel that your doctor is listening to you and addressing your concerns — not just doing a checklist.”
“We want to understand how precarious employment and labor exploitation affect the health of workers within the context of occupational and environmental epidemiology and look at more structural factors that drive these issues of precarity and labor exploitation.” — Lisbeth Iglesias-RĂos, PhD, MPH, MA
“The underlying theme of the work that we’ve been doing is that data is needed, evidence is needed to be able to inform policy changes, to inform programmatic changes that can make service provision more efficient and better for the farmworker community.” — Alexis J. Handal, PhD, MPH
Congratulations to Center Doctoral Student Lauren MacConnachie, MS, on her first publication as a lead author in Social Science & Medicine.
“Incarceration and housing insecurity represent severe and complex experiences of a multitude of psychosocial stressors, including discrimination, violence, and poverty. In this study, we investigated the association between incarceration and/or housing insecurity and advanced immune age in adults aged 55 and older.”
“Widespread exposure to toxins in heavy metals may have a big impact on health problems linked to earlier aging of the ovaries in middle-aged women, such as hot flashes, bone weakening and osteoporosis, higher chances of heart disease, and cognitive decline.”
Additional authors include lead author and Center Alumni Ning Ding, Center Core Faculty Xin Wang and John F Randolph, and Center Core Faculty and former Center Director Siobán D Harlow.
» Original study at the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism
Siobán Harlow, Center Core Faculty and former Center Director, has been honored by the creation of a named professorship after her. Effective December 1, 2023 and through November 30, 2025, Dr. Bhramar Mukherjee, Department of Biostatistics Chair, is the Siobán D. Harlow Collegiate Professor of Public Health. Dr. Harlow is only the second woman in the history of the School of Public Health to have a professorship named after her.
The SWAN Multi-Pollutant Study (MPS) was initiated in 2016 to examine health effects of multiple environmental chemical exposures, including perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine pesticides, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), metals, phenols, phthalates, and organophosphate pesticide among midlife women. Funded through two R01 grants by the National Institute of Environmental Health and Sciences (NIEHS), the SWAN MPS specifically investigates 1) obesity, type-2 diabetes and related metabolic endpoints; and 2) reproductive health including sex steroid hormones, age at menopause and ovarian aging).
The Michigan Farmworker Project (MFP) is a community-engaged project that aims to provide a deeper understanding of the complex working and living conditions of migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the state of Michigan and the relationship with health outcomes in this population. The MFP seeks to identify indicators of labor exploitation in farmworkers and relate this understanding to farmworker’s psychosocial, occupational and environmental risk factors as well as gaps in service provision and recommendations from farmworkers themselves to address their current working and living conditions.
SWAN Genomic Analyses performed dense genome-wide genotyping and imputation of genetic variants throughout the genome to the Haplotype Reference Consortium (HRC) reference panel in 1538 SWAN participants. This project enables SWAN to participate in genetic consortia focused on reproductive aging as well as risk factors for health and disease in women with data uploaded to dbGaP. We are also conducting gene-based analyses to assess the association of menopausal traits, including vasomotor symptoms, with genetic loci previously identified to be associated with age at menarche and menopause. (AG 017719)