REDUCING INFANT MORTALITY

Allegheny County rate higher than U.S. average

Magee-Womens awarded $5 million grant to study infant mortality.

The Richard King Mellon Foundation awarded a $5.1 million grant to the Magee-Womens Research Institute and its research partners as part of a larger $13 million project aimed at reducing infant mortality, the research institute announced Thursday.

The grant is the second phase of a project that is trying not only to find ways to reduce infant mortality but also to improve pregnancy health, encourage patient participation and find a way to help physicians to better use current research to help their patients.

“Our goal is to see babies live, grow and develop through their first year of life and thrive throughout their lifetime,” said Dr. Yoel Sadovsky, executive director of MWRI, in a news release. He also is professor of obstetrics and gynecology and lead investigator of the pregnancy and infant mortality project. “This grant will help us continue our work to fight infant mortality and other adverse

pregnancy outcomes that drastically impact the lives of mothers and families.”

Infant mortality is a death that occurs in the first year of life. In Allegheny County in 2017, 77 babies died in the first year of life. That rate is 5% higher than the national average, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. In addition, black infants in Allegheny County are more than five times more likely to die in the first year than white infants.

In the first phase of the project, two of MWRI’s research partners — Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Tsui Lab and the Rand Corp. — “created a unique integrated database, developed cuttingedge methods to predict infant mortality and preterm deliveries, and assessed the causal effects of interventions in order to help providers offer personalized solutions to reduce the risk of infant mortality,” according to the news release.

In the second phase, the $5.1 million grant will be used by Tsui Lab and another research partner, the University of Pennsylvania, to put into use a newly developed algorithm designed to predict individual infant mortality risks “in real time.”

Rand will use some of the second phase funding to “develop models to tailor recommended interventions to each woman based on her specific risks.”

Stanford University will work with Magee and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to pilot an app that will help physicians deliver information to help patients with intervention strategies.

Another portion of the funds will allow the Magee Obstetrical Maternal Infant Database to be expanded. Known as MOMI, the database already has information on more than 190,000 births, information that is used to help researchers study premature births, use of medications during pregnancy, the long-term impacts of pregnancy on a woman’s heart health, vaccine effectiveness and impacts, and how opioids and other substances during pregnancy impact future generations.

“Research advances continue to be made, yet infant mortality is still a major problem in the United States. The reason these rates are so much higher here than in other industrialized countries can’t be linked to one single issue,” Michael Annichine, chief executive officer of MWRI, said in the news release.