Length of PM2.5 exposure and alterations in the serum metabolome among women undergoing infertility treatment

Abstract

Both short-and long-term exposure to PM 2.5 has been related to adverse health outcomes. However, the biological pathways underlying these health effects are largely unknown. We identified several unique serum metabolomic pathways associated with acute and chronic PM 2.5 exposure. Major pathways associated with acute PM 2.5 exposure included amino acid, energy, and lipid metabolism. Major pathways associated with chronic PM 2.5 exposure included pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory pathways. Seven unique metabolites were identified with level-1 evidence.

Methylomic, proteomic, and metabolomic correlates of traffic-related air pollution: A systematic review, pathway analysis, and network analysis relating traffic-related air pollution to subclinical and clinical cardiorespiratory outcomes

“…Although we recommend the use of the most comprehensive technology available, the contribution of groundbreaking studies using older arrays to the current body of knowledge should not be understated [160,161]. Similarly, for the bioinformatics analyses of the methylomics results, researchers took advantage of the rapidly evolving tools such as KEGG for pathway analysis [39,43,114,133,157,158], the National Institutes of Health Databases for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery (NIH-DAVID) [39,53,62,152,153], Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) [40,63,126,148,154,162], Mummichog [15,92–94,101–103,105,106,163,164], and MetaboAnalyst [95–97,112,130,165–168].…”

“…In contrast to the proteomics literature, most (28/37) of the metabolomics papers used untargeted approaches and 22 incorporated bioinformatics approaches for the interpretation of results (e.g., 11 used Mummichog [15,[92][93][94][101][102][103]105,106,163,164] and nine used MetaboAnalyst [95][96][97]112,130,[165][166][167][168]; Supplementary S2 Table 3). Specific to metabolomics is the challenge of metabolite identification.…”

Association between traffic-related air pollution exposure and fertility-assisted births

“…A retrospective birth cohort study, which measured exposures (SO 2 , NO 2 , PM 2.5 , O 3 , PAH) from a central monitoring station during the 2 month period before the first menstrual cycle with unprotected sex, found a significant association between an increase in exposure of averaged PM 2.5 levels and a short-term decrease in fecundability by about 22% in Czech Republic [ 19 ]. Another study examined how different exposure windows can affect the biological pathways associated with reproductive processes targeted in infertility treatment [ 15 ]. After estimating PM 2.5 exposure in the 1, 2, and 3 d, 2 weeks, and 3 months prior to blood collection during ovarian stimulation, they found several pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, and metabolic pathways associated with long-term PM 2.5 exposure (2–3 months) which were not as stimulated within acute exposure windows.…”

“…Previous studies of PM 2.5 exposure and fertility outcomes have mainly focused on couples undergoing IVF treatments [11][12][13][14][15][16]. Increased PM 2.5 exposure has been shown to decrease pregnancy rates during IVF embryo culture [11].…”

Linking air pollution exposure to blood-based metabolic features in a community-based aging cohort

“…Several studies of short-term PM2.5 exposure have reported changes in arginine, histidine, linoleate, and leukotriene metabolism 17,65,68,69 . We did not find significant changes in levels of these metabolites associated with long-term exposure to PM2.5 in our study, suggesting that there might be exposure-window specific changes in circulating metabolites.…”