Air pollution and inflammation: Findings from concurrent repeated measures of systemic and reproductive tract cytokines during term pregnancy in Mexico City

Oil and gas production and spontaneous preterm birth in the San Joaquin Valley, CA

“…The etiology of preterm birth is suspected to include dysregulated inflammation, which may be a response to infection or oxidative stress associated with air pollution, including particulates and nitrous oxides. 27 , 28 The release of proinflammatory mediators, such as cytokines, is associated with exposure to particulates. 4 , 27 Psychosocial stress from activities associated with oil and gas preproduction, such as increased noise and traffic, could be an additional contributing factor to preterm birth.…”

“… 27 , 28 The release of proinflammatory mediators, such as cytokines, is associated with exposure to particulates. 4 , 27 Psychosocial stress from activities associated with oil and gas preproduction, such as increased noise and traffic, could be an additional contributing factor to preterm birth. 12 , 29 , 30 Recent study has found that exposure to drilling sites in the Marcellus Shale region of central and northwestern Pennsylvania adversely affected mental health, but that increased anxiety and depression did not mediate adverse birth outcomes.…”

Reproducibility of serum cytokines in an elderly population

“…An assessment of the long-term reproducibility of biomarkers is essential to explore the associations between biomarkers and diseases with long etiological windows, such as the neurodegenerative disease, cardiometabolic disease, or cancer. Majority of the previous studies evaluating the reproducibility of cytokines had used samples spanning a shorter period of time, such as 14 days [17], several months [14,15,18,19,21], 1~2 years [16], or 2~3 years [11,12,37]. The current study has a median time span of 4.49 (range = 2.86 to 15.26) years between the first and the last samples, probably fitting better the goal of evaluating the long-term reproducibility of cytokines.…”

“…Samples with cytokine levels less than the lower limit of detection (LLOD) were assigned a value of LLOD divided by the square root of two [19]. Observations beyond the upper limit of detection (ULOD) were substituted with ULOD for data analysis.…”

“…Several studies have explored the intra-individual temporal reproducibility of cytokines in humans (see Additional file 1: Table S1). However, there were some limitations in the previous studies, including small sample size [12][13][14][15][16], assessment of short-term variability [14,[17][18][19][20], analysis of a limited number of cytokines [15,16,18,21], or limited to specific populations such as women [11] or with particular physiological status of pregnancy [19]. Furthermore, the temporal reproducibility of cytokines has been predominantly examined for young and middle-aged adults, and the average age of participants was less than 65 years in many previous studies (see Additional file 1: Table S1).…”