Air pollution from traffic during pregnancy impairs newborn's cord blood immune cells: The NELA cohort
Section snippets
Funding sources
This study was supported by grants from Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and Fondos FEDER (grant numbers CP14/00046, PIE15/00051, PI16/00422 and ARADyAL network RD160006). AMGS was funded by a predoctoral Fellowship (FI17/00086) and EM was funded by Miguel Servet Fellowships (MS14/00046 and CPII19/00019) awarded by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and Fondos FEDER. The funders had
Study participants
Data come from participants embedded in the Nutrition in Early Life and Asthma (NELA) study (www.nela.imib.es), a prospective population-based birth cohort set up in Murcia, a south-eastern Mediterranean region of Spain. The main objective of NELA is to unravel the developmental origins and mechanisms of asthma and allergy.
Pregnant women who fulfill the inclusion criteria were invited to participate in the study at the time of the control ultrasound at 20 weeks of gestation at the
Results
The study population characteristics are presented in Table 1. The mean age of included pregnant women was 33.1 (±4.2) years (mean (±sd)); 52% were primiparous; 57% had a high educational level; and 16% reported to be active smokers during pregnancy. Overall, 23% of women were overweight and 11% obese before pregnancy; 14% reported to be asthmatic and 46% to have a history of atopy. The mean age of fathers was 35.6 (±5.2) years, 35% of them had a high educational level, and 37% reported to be
Discussion
This study shows that residential exposure to higher concentrations of traffic-related air pollutants during pregnancy alters the distribution of cord blood immune cells in neonates and identifies early and late gestation as windows of higher susceptibility. Greater NO2 concentration in early gestation (first trimester) was associated with decreased mean number of leukocytes. The mean number of NK cells decreased in relation to higher levels of NO2 during gestation, with stronger associations
Conclusions
In conclusion, long- and short-term exposure to traffic-related air pollutants through fetal development impairs leukocyte and lymphocyte distributions in cord blood of neonates. Early and late gestation may represent windows of higher susceptibility of fetal immune system to air pollutants. Further research is warranted to unravel whether the potential fetal immunotoxicity of traffic-related air pollutants persists beyond birth and/or leads to adverse immune mediated diseases, including
Credit author statement
Eva Morales and Luis García-Marcos conceived and supervised the project and recruited the participants. Pedro Jiménez-Guerrero and María Muñoz-García provided air pollution data. Carmen Ballesteros-Meseguer and Irene Pérez de los Cobos collected the biological samples. Azahara M. García-Serna, Trinidad Hernández-Caselles, Esther Cantero-Cano, and Elena Martín-Orozco performed the experiments. Azahara M. García-Serna and Trinidad Hernández-Caselles analyzed flow cytometry data. Azahara M.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors particularly thank all the participants for their generous collaboration. We want to particularly acknowledge the BioBank “Biobanco en Red de la Región de Murcia” (PT17/0015/0038) integrated in the Spanish National Biobanks Network (B.000859) for its collaboration.
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2021, Environmental ResearchCitation Excerpt :Consequently, we used NO2 concentrations measured by the air quality network background station closest to the mother's address. In the literature, exposure to prenatal TRAP appears to impair fetal immune system development and contribute to the development of childhood wheezing and asthma (García-Serna et al., 2020; Hehua et al., 2017). However, the impact of prenatal TRAP has been studied primarily in young children.
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Members of the NELA study group listed at the end of the article.