LATEBREAKER
Perinatal & Pediatric
County-Level Environmental Quality and Risk of Hypospadias in Arkansas Lydia Famuyide* Lydia Famuyide Jenil Patel Wendy N. Nembhard
Hypospadias, one of the most common genital defects in boys, affects about 1 in 125 liveborn boys. Although the etiology of hypospadias is most likely due to an interplay of genetic and environmental factors, the exact etiology remains unknown. Several studies have examined the association between a single environmental exposure and the risk of hypospadias, but few have assessed the possible effects of multiple environmental exposures simultaneously. Thus, we aimed to address this gap by assessing the association between cumulative maternal prenatal environmental exposures and hypospadias occurrence in offspring.
We conducted a retrospective cohort study using data from the 2006-2010 Arkansas environmental quality index (EQI), its domains (air, water, land, sociodemographic, and built), and related county-level estimates, matched to data on infants diagnosed with hypospadias and identified from the Arkansas Reproductive Health Monitoring System born 1993 – 2014. We classified the EQI and its domains into quartiles. Crude and adjusted prevalence ratios (PR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated from Poisson regression analyses to estimate the association between EQI and the prevalence of hypospadias.
For overall EQI, we observed a higher prevalence of hypospadias among boys born to women living in areas with fair environmental quality, compared to those living in areas with excellent environmental quality (PR=1.43; 95% CI=1.10, 1.87). We found no statistically significant association between the water domain and the prevalence of hypospadias. We also found that boys born in areas with fair air quality had a higher prevalence of hypospadias, compared to those born in areas with excellent air quality.
Our results suggest that while there is a potential positive association between overall poor environmental quality and the prevalence of hypospadias, the specific domains of sociodemographic, air, land, and built environments may play distinct roles.