pregnant women of color have been recruited throughout Oakland and San Francisco to participate in SOLARS!
community events throughout San Francisco and Oakland were attended to build relationships with and recruit community participants!
new graduate students researchers of color were added to the SOLARS team who are new to research and looking to make a difference in their communities!
13 clinics and community organizations have formed partnerships with SOLARS in San Francisco and Oakland to help recruit participants!
2019 was a monumental year for SOLARS study. The study, which is one of the first large-scale studies to examine the impact of stress, anxiety and racism – as well as resilience and coping – on gestational duration and preterm birth, launched in Oakland in January and in San Francisco in October! We are also thrilled to announce that Dr. Brittany Chambers will be taking the lead as the study's Principal Investigator starting January 1, 2020!
“SOLARS is unique because we are partnering with Black and Latina women to understand how chronic stressors like exposures to racism, perceived stress, intimate partner violence and pregnancy-related anxiety get under the skin to impact gestational duration and preterm birth,” says Chambers. “By improving our understanding of these interrelationships – and in partnership with communities most impacted – we hope to design more effective interventions aimed at reducing chronic stress and increasing gestational duration.”
Dr. Brittany Chambers,
SOLARS Principal Investigator
The study includes psychosocial measures of stress, resilience, and coping during and after pregnancy, as well as collection of biospecimens that will allow the research team to examine how psychosocial stress, resilience, coping, molecular stress signaling and other molecular signaling around immune, metabolic and epigenetic function are related. The goal is to unlock new pathways, discoveries and findings that can lead to effective interventions to increase gestational duration and decrease risk for preterm birth in Black and Brown communities.
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Help Us Understand the Link Between Stress and Preterm Birth
