Dr. Chambers is selected by the UC San Diego Chancellor’s Committee on the Status of Women to be UCSD’s nominee for the YWCA’s Tribute to Women & Industry Awards (TWIN). The TWIN award recognizes women in a managerial, executive, or leadership roles for their extraordinary achievements.
Your Gift Supports Critically-Needed Research On The Effects Of COVID-19 Infection On Mom And Baby
As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the nation, pregnant and breastfeeding women and the healthcare providers who treat them are left wondering how the virus might impact moms and babies. The Center for Better Beginnings at UC San Diego Health has recently launched two observational research studies to gather this much-needed information – and we need your generous support to carry them out!
Benefits of Your Gift
According to our Center’s Co-director and lead study investigator Dr. Christina Chambers, “Women and their health care providers need answers as quickly as possible regarding the effects of COVID-19 during pregnancy and while breastfeeding. We know that pregnant and breastfeeding moms are contracting COVID-19, but the fact of the matter is that we know very little about its short-and long-term effects on a developing baby.”
With your help, we can learn more about whether COVID-19 infection during pregnancy or while breastfeeding has any impact on pregnancy outcomes or on child growth and development. This information can then be used by healthcare providers so they can counsel their patients for the best possible outcomes for both mom and baby.
More About Our Center
The Center for Better Beginnings is housed in the UC San Diego Department of Pediatrics. The Center includes programs dedicated to the identification, prevention, and treatment of birth defects that are caused by exposures (like COVID-19) during pregnancy and while breastfeeding. These programs include MotherToBaby Pregnancy Studies (which is carrying out the pregnancy portion of the study) and Mommy’s Milk Human Milk Research Biorepository (which is carrying out the breastfeeding portion of the study). Read More.
Researchers at the Center for Better Beginnings have launched two new studies examining the effects of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in pregnancy and breastfeeding.
An observational study coordinated by our MotherToBaby Pregnancy Studies is currently enrolling women with known or suspected COVID-19 infection during a current or recent pregnancy or within 30 days of a woman’s last menstrual period before conception.
“To date, there are only a few case reports of pregnancy outcomes following maternal infection with this new virus,” said our Co-Director Christina Chambers, PhD, MPH, lead investigator of MotherToBaby Pregnancy Studies, professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego and current president of the Organization of Teratology Information Specialists (OTIS), the non-profit organization comprised of birth defects experts and which provides the no-cost MotherToBaby information service. “However, prior research on respiratory infections, such as seasonal influenza, has indicated that pregnant women in general are at higher risk than non-pregnant women for complications from the infection, which in turn can lead to more common pregnancy complications, such as preterm delivery. In addition, a high fever early in pregnancy may pose a risk for the developing fetus.”
The study will recruit pregnant women who reside anywhere in the United States or Canada. Mothers will be interviewed by telephone over the course of their pregnancy and postpartum period and will be asked to release relevant medical records from their and their baby’s health care providers. This information will be used to assess the course of pregnancy and outcomes for both mother and infant. This work will be coordinated with other efforts being initiated throughout the U.S. and other countries.
In addition, our Mommy’s Milk: Human Milk Biorepository is launching a study looking at breastfeeding women with known or suspected COVID-19 infection. Using a common protocol developed in coordination with UC San Diego’s MOMI CORE, mothers will be interviewed by phone and will be asked to provide some biological samples from themselves and their infant, including a sample of breast milk. Information will also be gathered on the infant’s growth and developmental outcomes.
“Women and their health care providers need answers as quickly as possible regarding the effects of COVID-19 during pregnancy and while breastfeeding,” said Chambers. “We know that pregnant and breastfeeding moms are contracting COVID-19, but the fact of the matter is that we know very little about its short-and long-term effects on a developing baby.”
If you would like to join our important new studies, please contact us for more information.
Our Mommy’s Milk program also quickly established a study to collect breast milk from lactating mothers who had contracted COVID-19 infection. This study was among the first to find that breast milk did not contain viral DNA from COVID-19, and thus was unlikely to transmit COVID-19 infection to a breastfed infant.
Within days of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., our MotherToBaby Pregnancy Studies program opened recruitment to pregnant people who were infected with or exposed to COVID-19 infection.
In March 2020, our work as we knew it changed with the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like the rest of the world, we rapidly adapted and evolved to shift to remote work arrangements and halt any non-essential face-to-face interactions with the public, such as our community and healthcare provider outreach activities.
Dr. Miguel del Campo is named Genetics section chief at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego.
As part of the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA)-funded Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (CIFASD), our research team has been working in close collaboration with the OMNI-Net Ukraine Birth Defects Prevention Program to conduct global research and education over the last 15 years. OMNI-Net is a non-profit organization comprised of experts who provide birth defects surveillance, education, training, family support, and prevention activities across several regions in Ukraine. Our long-standing collaboration in Ukraine has been led by Lead Scientist at UC San Diego, Dr. Wladimir Wertelecki, who is the primary liaison and Scientific Director for this ground-breaking work.
Research collaborations in Ukraine led by Dr. Wertelecki (pictured at right) have focused on the earlier identification and prevention of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) in several key areas:
With Dr. Wertelecki and the Principal Investigators in Ukraine, Dr. Lyubov Yevtushok and Dr. Natalya Zymak-Zakutnya, findings from these research activities have helped inform interventions. As a result, members of the research team have engaged in trainings for clinicians across Ukraine, and have partnered with OMNI-Net to develop the first Ukrainian Teratogen Information Service (UTIS).
Links to selected publications from the volume of work produced by this collaboration are below.
The very first MotherToBaby information service is celebrating its 40th year of service at the UC San Diego Center for Better Beginnings this October! Program Founder and current Medical Director Dr. Ken Lyons Jones recalled that when he joined UC San Diego in 1974 as a new pediatrician, he was fresh off the publication of his seminal paper that first described Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, a condition that results in brain damage and growth problems in a child when alcohol is consumed during pregnancy. As a specialist focused on identifying and treating children with birth defects, Dr. Jones noticed that he started receiving an increasing number of calls from his healthcare colleagues and from women in the local community who wanted to know about the effects of different environmental exposures (like medications a mom was taking) during pregnancy and while breastfeeding.
“What we’d do was say, ‘We don’t know, but we could find out!’ Then we’d race over to the library and look up everything that we could find on that drug. We’d find all kinds of information about the effects of the medication on a rat, guinea pig or mouse – and we would call back the woman and tell her everything that we found out about the effects on that rat, guinea pig and mouse. And she’d say ‘that is really interesting – but what about me?’ And we’d say, unfortunately there’s no information about how it affects human health or developing fetus,” said Dr. Jones while addressing the audience at our October 3rd celebration. The volume of calls he received suggested to Dr. Jones a dire need in the community, so in 1979 Dr. Jones founded the first “teratogen information service” – a service dedicated to providing up-to-date, evidence-based information about environmental exposures during pregnancy and while breastfeeding. Initially called the San Diego County Teratogen Registry, the program soon expanded organically – and by necessity – into a parallel research program to collect pregnancy information from women with select exposures so that critical information gaps on medication safety could be filled.
Over the years, the name of the service changed a few times. In 1989, it became the California Teratogen Information Service (CTIS) and Clinical Research Program. Later, the program became an affiliate of the non-profit Organization of Teratology Information Specialists (OTIS), and when OTIS changed the name of the information service to MotherToBaby in 2013, MotherToBaby California was born! Similarly, the research program has evolved over time and is now known as MotherToBaby Pregnancy Studies, one of the largest pregnancy registries on medicines and vaccines in North America.
As the first-of-its-kind, MotherToBaby California has been used as a model nationally and worldwide for the development of other teratogen information services. Importantly, in its 40 year history the program has always been available at no-cost to the public. It has been supported by continuous funding since 1981 from the California Department of Education, and since 2014 has also received sub-awardee funding from the U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration.
Earlier this month, moms, community partners, and current and former program staff came together to celebrate the monumental achievements of the program. The value of the program, as one mom shared, was that “While there were a lot of unknowns about my medications, I at least felt like I had some information and I could make an educated decision – not one based on fear.” Please join us in celebrating the origins and accomplishments of MotherToBaby California and our continued effort to promote the health of moms and babies and reduce the risk of preventable birth defects!
Adalimumab (sold under the trade name Humira®) is a medication used to treat a number of autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s Disease. But what effects might it have if it is taken during pregnancy? Our new study, which was published today in the journal Public Library of Science (PLOS) One, examined this very question.
What did we do? As part of our MotherToBaby Pregnancy Studies, we recruited 602 pregnant women across the United States and Canada between 2004-2016. This included women who had or had not taken adalimumab for their autoimmune disease, as well as generally healthy pregnant women for comparison. Women were followed until they delivered their babies, and their babies were followed up to 1 year of age. We collected information by interviewing moms, examining medical records, and conducting a specialized exam with the babies. Funding for the study was provided by AbbVie.
What did we find? We found that the use of adalimumab in pregnancy is not associated with an increased risk for adverse outcomes, such as major structural birth defects, spontaneous abortion, and preterm delivery. We also found that regardless of whether they took adalimumab, pregnant women with rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn’s Disease were at an increased risk of delivering their baby pre-term (before 37 weeks of pregnancy).
So what’s the take-away? The lead investigator on this study and our Center co-director Dr. Tina Chambers, PhD, MPH, said it best: “Many women hoping to start a family rely on adalimumab to control symptoms related to crippling autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn’s Disease. The fact that this study showed no increased risk in adverse birth outcomes with the use of adalimumab in pregnancy is important since not a lot of research was previously available on this particular medication.”
She added that, “Studies on medication use in general are lacking when it comes to understanding their effects on pregnancy, making it difficult for pregnant women and their healthcare providers to make informed decisions,” said Dr. Chambers. “We are proud to add valuable information to the literature and encourage more pregnant women to consider volunteering for critical observational studies.”
To learn more about our ongoing MotherToBaby Pregnancy Studies, visit www.MotherToBaby.org/Studies, call (877) 311-8972, email MotherToBaby@ucsd.edu.
