Laura Andrea Rodríguez Villamizar, director of the Department of Public Health at the School of Medicine and member of the GUINDESS research group, participated as a speaker at the 43rd SEE (Spanish Society of Epidemiology) Meeting and 20th APE (Portuguese Association of Epidemiology) Congress, held from September 2 to 5 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
The aim of this academic meeting was to bring together professionals working in epidemiology in Spain, Portugal, and other Latin American countries.
The presentation of Professor Laura Andrea’s oral paper entitled “Adverse perinatal events and chronic exposure to PM2.5 at the intra-urban level in cities in Colombia” was to describe the geographical variability of some adverse perinatal events at the intra-urban level in four capital cities and to evaluate their relationship with chronic exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5).
The methodology used began with a retrospective ecological study of adverse perinatal events in four major cities in Colombia between 2015 and 2019. Birth data were obtained from the National Vital Statistics System, and census tracts (CT) were used as the geographical unit of analysis. The percentage of low birth weight at term (LBWT) and the percentage of preterm birth (PTB) were calculated as adverse perinatal events of interest.
PM2.5 exposure levels were derived from land use regression (LUR) models available for the five cities for the year 2021. The Colombian multidimensional poverty index (MPI) at the census tract level was used as a measure to control for socioeconomic conditions. Negative binomial multivariate models with robust variance grouped by city were generated, including as offset variables the total number of births per census tract for the PTP model and the total number of full-term births for the LBW model.
Study results
The percentage of births with PPT was 10.1% for Barranquilla, 10.4% for Bucaramanga, 9.6% for Cali, and 9.9% for Medellín. The percentage of LBW was 4.1% for Barranquilla, 2.6% for Bucaramanga, 3.4% for Cali, and 4.5% for Medellín. The geographic distribution of both indicators showed great spatial heterogeneity within the cities. None of the models showed a statistically significant association between average PM2.5 levels and the prevalence of PPT or LBW. An association with the IPM quintiles was only evident in the city of Cali, where the highest strata have a higher percentage of LBW.
Conclusions
No association was found between chronic PM2.5 exposure levels and the prevalence of preterm birth or low birth weight at term at the CS level in any of the cities.
This research was conducted as part of the air quality and urban environmental health project in five cities in Colombia under the Environmental Health Research Program for Colombia funded by Minciencias. Fourteen researchers from different universities in the country participated in this project, including UIS, Universidad Nacional, Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga, Universidad del Norte, Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana de Medellín, Universidad de Antioquia, and the National Institute of Health.
Conference information
