Saving Black Families: From the Microbiome and Beyond

My name is Jocelyn Stanfield, and I am a fourth-year undergraduate studying psychology at Emory University. My research focuses on the impacts of environmental toxicants on African American mothers and their infants. When I began my career at Emory, I was very interested in minority health, having come from a family where apprehension toward healthcare professionals was normal. We were told horror stories about black women dying from simple medical procedures. The United States has one of the highest rates of maternal death during childbirth, and an alarming percentage of these victims are black. There was no way, in my mind, that a country as “modern” as the United States could allow its own citizens to perish from what should be a relatively routine procedure. Intrigued and concerned, I had to investigate further.

As I researched more, I came across a few publications that aimed to address this issue. One such paper, “The infant microbiome: implications for infant health and neurocognitive development”, involved research done in Atlanta (Yang et al., 2016). They looked at the role of the microbiome on prenatal complications including preterm birth. The microbiome is essentially all of the bacteria that reside in your body and get passed down from mother to offspring. It is becoming an area of interest in research, because of its connection to the immune system and various neural pathways. Microbiomes may be negatively influenced by maternal prenatal stress. This phenomenon is of particular concern in populations exposed to major stressors like racial prejudice or sexism. Consequently, black women and their babies can be severely affected by chronic stress through this mechanism. Inspired by these findings, I ended up joining the lab a few months later. I did not fully realize the significance of this research until I began working with the participants. Our participants include black mothers who are experiencing homelessness, single-mothers, mothers who are victims of domestic violence, and anywhere in between. We try to make the study as convenient as possible by providing transportation to and from the lab. After all of the visits, the mothers get paid for their time and they receive diapers, blankets, wipes, and snacks for their children. We then provide them a list of helpful resources for shelters, mental health services, and childcare. We send cards to all of our participants for every birthday and Mother’s Day. I feel so lucky to be a part of a lab that not only oversees amazing research, but also genuinely cares about their participants.

I received my first taste of independent research when I proposed a project, divergent from the microbiome, that aimed to explore the associations between prenatal nicotine exposure and infant development. My analysis indicated a significant, negative association between nicotine exposure and receptive communication scores in infants. Receptive communication refers to one’s ability to correctly interpret auditory information. This revealed a major research breakthrough as my findings suggest that prenatal maternal smoking may be adversely impacting language development, particularly through this method of auditory processing. This is a crucial area of research, as environmental toxicants play an important role in the health of many people living in urban settings such as Atlanta, Georgia. In predominantly black, urban environments, greater smoking rates amplify our exposure to destructive toxicants, like nicotine. My hope is that this data will be utilized to create more robust prevention methods for populations susceptible to environmental toxicants.

My summer research provided the foundation and impetus for my honors thesis, which I am currently working on. I had already found deleterious effects of prenatal exposure to one substance; I wondered how these effects might be exacerbated by concurrent use of two substances. My advisor discovered a large portion of our sample of mothers reported co-use of marijuana and nicotine. Additionally, mothers often described being exposed to secondhand smoke in the home from their partners or others who spent a significant amount of time around them. Ultimately, I decided to investigate the impact of prenatal co-exposure to marijuana and nicotine on infant development. My project is in its infancy, no pun intended, so I do not yet have any significant results to report. However, there is no doubt in my mind that my contributions are important. I want my research to provide insight into the potentially harmful effects of prenatal substance use in black communities. Gaining more knowledge in this field will enrich existing literature with transformative insight and raise awareness for affected areas about a pressing public health issue.

 - Jocelyn Stanfield