“Our data suggests that women with higher blood concentrations of PFOA and PFOS reached menopause earlier … than those with low exposure. This is equivalent to the effect of cigarette smoke, a known reproductive toxicant, where we compared current smokers and nonsmokers.”
“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.”
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 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.
Initiated in 2013, MiLES is a newly established cohort study which creates and maintains the MiLES Longitudinal Cohort & Biobank, including lupus cases from the southeast Michigan surveillance registry as well as population-based controls.
The 34-year MBHMS follows the daughters of participants in the historic Tecumseh Community Health Study to evaluate the impact of aging-related processes including menopause and the secular increase in obesity on the development and progression of musculoskeletal disease and declines in physical functioning. This study addresses a significant gap in scientific knowledge that impedes our ability to optimize fracture prevention strategies. If our hypotheses prove correct, baseline external bone size may be used as an additional parameter to identify women most likely to lose bone strength rapidly during the MT and who might benefit from early intervention.