Urban environment during pregnancy, cognitive abilities, motor function, and externalizing and internalizing symptoms at 2–5 years old in 3 Canadian birth cohorts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Effects of the urban environment on neurodevelopment are understudied. • We estimated 7 exposures of built environment, surrounding greenness, and air pollution. • We assessed cognitive and motor function, internalizing and externalizing symptoms. • Urban environment was not associated with neurodevelopment at ages 2 to 5. More than 80% of the Canadian population lives in urban settings. Urban areas usually bring exposure to poorer air quality, less access to green spaces, and higher building density. These environmental factors may endanger child development. To assess the relationship of urban environmental exposures during pregnancy with cognitive abilities, motor function, externalizing and internalizing symptoms in children. We included 6,279 mother–child pairs from 3 Canadian population-based birth-cohorts (3D Cohort Study in Montreal, Quebec City, and Sherbrooke, AOF Study in Calgary, CHILD Study in Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, and Winnipeg). We estimated 7 environmental exposures of the built environment, surrounding greenness, and air pollution, around participant’s home addresses during pregnancy. Validated neuropsychological tests were used to assess non-verbal and verbal abilities, gross and fine motor function, externalizing and internalizing symptoms at child’s age 2 to 5 years. We assessed associations of each environmental exposure indicator with each of the 6 outcomes, using multivariate linear regression models. We conducted analyses separately by city of recruitment and combined estimates in meta -analyses. Overall, urban environment during pregnancy was not associated with cognitive abilities (e.g., −0.81 non-verbal points 95 %CI [-2.10; 0.48] per 1 μg/m 3 increase in PM 2.5 ), motor function, or externalizing and internalizing symptoms. In individual cohorts, we found associations of some environmental exposures, in particular building density, fine particles, and nitrogen dioxide with non-verbal abilities, verbal abilities, and fine motor function, but overall confidence intervals in the meta -analyses included the null. We found no evidence of a relationship of prenatal built environment, surrounding greenness, and air pollution with cognitive abilities, motor functions or externalizing and internalizing symptoms in childhood. Urban environment has been shown to influence health across the lifecourse, however, specific exposures during pregnancy do not seem associated with poorer neurodevelopment in children of 2- to 5- year.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".