A.j. Agopian
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
Birth defects are the leading cause of infant death, disability and medical spending in the first year of life, yet for most affected babies the cause is unknown. That gap makes prevention difficult.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
birth defects
congenital anomalies
risk factors
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Contribute patient recruitment, data collection and epidemiologic analysis from the Texas Birth Defects Registry to the multi-state BD-STEPS study, adding a diverse population with many Mexican American families.
- Test associations between social determinants of health, such as living conditions and access to resources, and the risk of specific birth defects, in work led by the Texas Department of State Health Services.
- Examine genetic risk factors for birth defects in work led by Baylor College of Medicine, and how they relate to the mechanisms behind particular defects.
- Investigate whether parents' occupational, or workplace, exposures are associated with birth defect risk, in work led by the UTHealth School of Public Health.
More about the research
Much U.S. research has also studied populations with limited diversity, mostly non-Hispanic white families. This work brings Texas, with its large and diverse population including many Mexican American families, into a national effort to find risk factors that parents could change.
Why it matters
Identifying genetic and non-genetic risk factors for birth defects, especially exposures that parents could modify, could guide prevention strategies that lower how often these conditions occur. Including Texas's diverse population, particularly Mexican American families, could make findings apply to groups often missing from earlier studies and could improve health among infants born with birth defects.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gladys Maestre
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether familism, strong family ties and support, protects Mexican Americans in the San Antonio Mexican American Family Study from Alzheimer's-like cognitive decline compared with other forms of decline.
Eduardo Villamor
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build a whole-country cohort of more than 1.4 million grandmother–parent–grandchild triads by linking nationwide Swedish registries.
Francine Laden
Harvard University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine how air pollution, ultraviolet radiation, radon, demographic factors and social determinants of health relate to mammographic density, texture and deep-learning risk scores in Nurses' Health Study 3 participants.
The school
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: 25 labs on PI Pages, $419M a year on research, 340 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
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