Health disparities, environmental toxicants, and midlife women’s health outcomes

Health disparities and increased exposures to environmental toxicants continue to persist in some of the most vulnerable populations including women from racial and minority groups and older populations. Women from urban areas of developed countries tend to carry the heaviest burdens of both occupational, environmental, and social stress thus causing cascading biological changes that can affect reproductive capabilities. Midlife, which is the period between the ages of 40-59, presents major gaps in reproductive and menopausal research and thus understanding health disparities and exposures to environmental toxicants in this population is of great public health concern. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand and evaluate racial and socioeconomic differences in quality of life and phthalate exposure in midlife women. Approaching this issue is three-fold; first ordinal logistic regressions were applied to the Midlife Women’s Health Study (MWHS) to understand the relationship between health, demographic, and lifestyle factors on quality of life between racial and minority groups at midlife. Secondly, to understand phthalate exposure and its associations with fibroids and body mass index at menopause, three statistical methods for phthalate mixture analysis were conducted. We evaluated and compared the predictive capabilities of principal component regression, weighted quantile sum regression, and Bayesian kernel machine regression for both continuous and binomial outcome variables. Last, mediation analysis was conducted in the MWHS to understand racial and socioeconomic differences in the associations of phthalate exposure and hot flashes. This work illustrates racial differences in both QoL and phthalate exposure exists and further studies are needed to address both individual and systemic risk factors.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Informatics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Smith, Brandi Patrice

Contributors dc:contributor

• Smith, Rebecca L
• Flaws, Jodi A
• Madak-Erdogan, Zeynep
• Lipka, Alexander

• Phthalates
• Disparities
• Race
• Health
• Toxicology

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2021 Brandi Patrice Smith

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113140

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113140