Objective: To investigate the relationship between acute exposure to air pollutants and spontaneous pregnancy loss. Design: Case-crossover study from 2007 to 2015. Setting: An academic emergency department in the Wasatch Front area of Utah. Patient(s): A total of 1,398 women who experienced spontaneous pregnancy loss events. Intervention(s): None. Main Outcome Measure(s): Odds of spontaneous pregnancy loss. Result(s): We found that a 10-ppb increase in 7-day average levels of nitrogen dioxide was associated with a 16% increase in the odds of spontaneous pregnancy loss (odds ratio [OR] ¼ 1.16; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.01-1.33; P¼ .04). A 10-mg/m 3 increase in 3-day and 7-day averages of fine particulate matter were associated with increased risk of spontaneous pregnancy loss, but the associations did not reach statistical significance (OR 3-day average ¼ 1.09; 95% CI 0.99-1.20; P¼ .05) (OR 7-day average ¼ 1.11; 95% CI 0.99-1.24; P¼ .06). We found no evidence of increased risk for any other metrics of nitrogen dioxide or fine particulate matter or any metric for ozone. Conclusions: We found that short-term exposure to elevated levels of air pollutants was associated with higher risk for spontaneous pregnancy loss. (Fertil Steril Ò 2019;111:341-7. Ó2018 by American Society for Reproductive Medicine.) El resumen está disponible en Español al final del artículo.

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Gene symbols are recognizable identifiers for gene names but are unstable and error-prone due to aliasing, manual entry, and unintentional conversion by spreadsheets to date format. Official gene symbol resources such as HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) for human genes and the Mouse Genome Informatics project (MGI) for mouse genes provide authoritative sources of valid, aliased, and outdated symbols, but lack a programmatic interface and correction of symbols converted by spreadsheets. We present HGNChelper, an R package that identifies known aliases and outdated gene symbols based on the HGNC human and MGI mouse gene symbol databases, in addition to common mislabeling introduced by spreadsheets, and provides corrections where possible. HGNChelper identified invalid gene symbols in the most recent Molecular Signatures Database (mSigDB 7.0) and in platform annotation files of the Gene Expression Omnibus, with prevalence ranging from ~3% in recent platforms to 30-40% in the earliest platforms from 2002-03. HGNChelper is installable from CRAN.