Posted by anderc8 on Friday, January 6, 2017 in News, TIPs 2015.

Written by Vanderbilt School of Medicine professor David Aronoff

The Vanderbilt Pre³ Initiative (Preventing adverse Pregnancy outcomes and Prematurity) is an interdisciplinary group of faculty and learners with a shared interest in reducing the burden of preterm birth and other adverse pregnancy outcomes through discovery, innovation, implementation, and education. Why does Vanderbilt need to be a leader in this space? Reproductive health is central to all human wellbeing and every person experiences childbirth. Despite the central importance of reproduction to human populations, adverse pregnancy outcomes remain all too common. Global statistics are staggering: every day approximately 830 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, while each year witnesses nearly 2.7 million neonatal deaths and 2.6 million stillbirths. Non-fatal complications of pregnancy are even more common, including preterm birth, preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction, gestational diabetes, and congenital infections. Preterm birth (~15 million each year) is the leading cause of death in neonates and children under 5 years of age. These problems are also local. Tennessee has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country and has a preterm birth rate of 11%, making our state the 45^th worst in terms of preterm birth rate among all states.

Pregnancy complications have devastating and destabilizing effects on the medical, emotional and economic wellbeing of families, communities, nations, and global populations. Emerging research into the developmental origins of health and disease reveal that poor reproductive health in mothers and fathers increases the risk for lifelong morbidity in their offspring, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and neurocognitive disorders. Many of these reproductive health problems are driven by poverty, malnutrition (or over nutrition), unclean water, infectious diseases, environmental exposures, political instability, and poor access to healthcare. Clearly, multidisciplinary solutions are needed to surmount these difficult problems. Leading minds, such as those at Vanderbilt, are needed to creatively and cooperatively discover and implement solutions to improve reproductive health, particularly considering the great burden of adverse pregnancy and neonatal outcomes in our region. New leaders must be developed if improvements are to be sustained and future threats managed. Recent efforts across campus underscore that VU and VUMC are perfectly positioned to emerge as national and international leaders in this space. The Vanderbilt Pre³ Initiative seeks to be the catalyst for this effort.

The Vanderbilt Pre³ Initiative has faculty from all over the VU/VUMC campus engaged in cooperative efforts to improve pregnancy outcomes. Funding from the TIPs Council is catalyzing the success of these efforts. Among many things, with TIPs funding we are actively piloting the development of a gestational tissue biorepository for investigators to use for translational studies of pregnancy. In addition, we are funding seed grants for young investigators to advance our knowledge of maternal-child health through discovery, and we regularly host visiting scholars who are leading experts in maternal-child health to spend time interacting with our teams across campus.

In subsequent blog posts, we will highlight some of the work our teams are doing here, supported by our program, to improve maternal-child health within our community and beyond. From the development of innovative bedside diagnostic tools to community-engagement projects designed to improve the retention of young mothers into antenatal and postpartum healthcare we are leading many important efforts and are excited to share them with you! Stay tuned and engage with us by leaving comments below! Also feel free to contact me, David Aronoff, MD, the Director of the Vanderbilt Pre³ Initiative, for more information or visit our website: https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/pre3-initiative/