The PrePARED Consortium

Preconception Period Analysis of Risks and Exposures Influencing Health and Development

“[P]renatal care may be too little too late. … If we want to do something about preventing [adverse birth outcomes] in this country, we really need to start taking care of women’s health long before they get pregnant…[B]y the time a baby is born, you’ve lost half of the battle already.”

— Gee and Johnson, 2012 

Interest in the investigation of preconceptional exposures as determinants of long-term health outcomes for both mothers and their children. Targeting the preconception time period is a potentially effective strategy to reduce health disparities.

The goals of the PrePARED consortium is to use the large number of studies, cross-sectional and longitudinal data, and mix of studies to:

1. Identify meaningful (at a clinical or population level) effect sizes of preconception exposures
2. Determine the relative importance of pre-, during-, inter-, and post-pregnancy effects
3. Distinguish selection effects due to differential fertility and pregnancy loss
4. Identify possible mechanisms
5. Examine rare-prevalence exposures and outcomes
6. Examine effect modification in associations between preconception exposures and health outcomes across subgroups of interest (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status).

The Preconception Period analysis of Risks and Exposures Influencing health and Development (PrePARED) consortium

The PrePARED Consortium: Policies and Procedures