Kaitlyn Stanhope
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Each year in the United States, at least 1 in 10 pregnant people develops a cardiometabolic disorder of pregnancy, meaning a problem with blood pressure, blood vessels or metabolism. These include hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP), a group of high blood pressure conditions affecting 6–8% of pregnancies, and gestational diabetes (GDM, 2–10%).
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
maternal health
pregnancy
postpartum
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Estimate the direct and indirect effects of lifetime trauma on cardiometabolic disorders of pregnancy, namely hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and gestational diabetes, using the Grady Trauma Project cohort and the EmPOWR pregnancy registry.
- Estimate the effect of a risky childhood family environment on incident gestational diabetes and on changes in cardiometabolic function following childbearing, using longitudinal CARDIA cohort data.
- Describe trajectories of cumulative life stress and estimate how distinct pre-pregnancy stress patterns affect postpartum weight loss among pregnant and postpartum women.
- Estimate the effect of cumulative life stress before pregnancy on lactation and on sleep duration after childbirth.
More about the research
Either diagnosis raises the risk of severe illness or death for the mother, harms infant outcomes, and increases long-term risk of heart and metabolic disease. Non-Hispanic Black and low-income women face higher risk than white or higher-income women, and medical risk factors and access to care explain only part of that gap. Theory and limited evidence suggest that stress and trauma across the life course, including from racism, add to the risk, but evidence during pregnancy and postpartum is thin. The guiding question is how stressful and traumatic experiences become embodied in women's cardiometabolic health during and after pregnancy.
Why it matters
Results could expand options for preventing heart and metabolic disease in women before, during and after pregnancy, with particular relevance for Black and low-income women who bear more of this burden. Clarifying how accumulated stress and trauma shape pregnancy complications and postpartum recovery may inform life course theory and the design of preconception, prenatal and postpartum interventions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jennifer Stowell
University of Maryland, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Quantify how preconception and prenatal exposure to extreme heat and wildfire smoke PM2.5 affects risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, using Cox regression within a distributed lag nonlinear framework on about 6.5 million births in claims data.
Jonathan Purnell
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Public Health & Epidemiology
Compare birth size for gestational age, infant weight gain and BMI through age six in children of 2,120 women who had bariatric surgery before pregnancy versus 21,200 children of women without surgery, matched on pre-surgery or pre-pregnancy BMI.
Bilgay Izci Balserak
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether the sleep BETTER program improves fasting glucose, insulin sensitivity and glycemic control in overweight or obese African American pregnant women, compared with a Birth-Prep control, in a 150-person randomized trial.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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