Grant: Operating Grant: Analyses of Existing Cohorts & Databases - IHDCYH

The placenta makes multiple hormones to sustain a pregnancy and produce a healthy fetus. Hormones like estrogen rise 10-50 times higher in pregnancy. Prenatal biochemical serum screening is standard program that has been available to all Ontarian women since 1994. The serum screening measures several hormones in early pregnancy, such as estriol, to predict if a fetus might have Down's syndrome or certain birth defects. We have linked all Ontario biochemical screening data, for 1.2 million pregnancies, to existing datasets at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), where we are scientists. Given that estrogens and other hormones measured in pregnancy are thought to influence the risk of heart disease and stroke, as well as certain cancers, we now wish to assess if prenatal biochemical screening-based hormone levels can predict a woman's future risk, after pregnancy, of developing: i) premature cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke), and ii) hormone-sensitive cancers (breast, endometrial, ovarian and thyroid). This novel approach for evaluating a woman's future risk of cardiovascular disease follows our prior work (see http://goo.gl/H8ktxV). We think that the proposed study might further enhance our ability to predict heart disease and stroke, while taking advantage of existing hormone measures from a woman's pregnancy. Thus, the information is available and free of cost. We also hope to create a new frontier study of cancer risk assessment by using prenatal biochemical screening to predict hormone-sensitive cancers later in life.