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Latent Profile Analysis of Phthalate and Paraben Exposure in Pregnant Women (309584)

Keywords: Latent Profile Analysis, Chemical Exposure Data, preterm birth, LIFECODES, unsupervised classification methods

While phthalate and paraben exposure in pregnant individuals has previously been linked to adverse health outcomes such as preterm birth, the use of a clustering model such as Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) will allow the grouping of women into exposure classes in order to identify the individuals most at risk. Women in the LIFECODES Birth cohort who did not experience preterm birth are grouped based on their exposure using measured levels of urinary phthalate metabolites and parabens. This results in 4 latent classes that are identified to be women who experienced “low exposure”, “high paraben/ low phthalate exposure”, “high phthalate/ low paraben exposure”, and “high exposure.” The high and low exposure classes appear to contain individuals with certain demographic characteristics; the low exposure class has a high percentage of white individuals and individuals with any college education while the high exposure class had a concentration of black individuals and individuals with a high school degree or less. With these results we can now identify groups of individuals that could benefit from behavior modification to reduce their exposure and potentially their health risks.