ArticlePopulation research and policy review2019
Detecting the Effects of Early-Life Exposures: Why Fecundity Matters.
Article in Population research and policy review, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Human fertility after a disaster: a systematic literature review.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Pooled it
- Early-life nutritional environment is associated with late-life cognition in the Health and Retirement Study, a pellagra epidemic natural experiment.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Does humidity matter? Prenatal heat and child health in South Asia.Science advances · 2025Article
- Parental socioeconomic composition of birth cohorts changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.Nature communications · 2025Article
- It's Raining Babies? Flood Exposures and Fertility in Bangladesh.Population and development review · 2025Article
- Early-Life Lead Exposure and Male Longevity: Evidence from Historical Municipal Water Systems.Explorations in economic history · 2025Article
- Fertility in a Pandemic: Evidence from California.Population and development review · 2024Article
- Exploring the Fetal Origins Hypothesis Using Genetic Data.Social forces; a scientific medium of social study and interpretation · 2024Article
- African American Unemployment and the Disparity in Periviable Births.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2022Article
- GWAS on birth year infant mortality rates provides evidence of recent natural selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Understanding the Pathways from Prenatal and Post-Birth PMInternational journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Observational
- Climate change, social vulnerability and child nutrition in South Asia.Global environmental change : human and policy dimensions · 2021Article
- Article
- The Impact of Abortion Underreporting on Pregnancy Data and Related Research.Maternal and child health journal · 2021Article
- Environmental hazards, social inequality, and fetal loss: Implications of live-birth bias for estimation of disparities in birth outcomes.Environmental epidemiology (Philadelphia, Pa.) · 2021Article
- In utero exposure to threat of evictions and preterm birth: Evidence from the United States.Health services research · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Prenatal exposures have meaningful effects on health across the lifecourse. Innovations in causal inference have shed new light on these effects. Here, we motivate the importance of innovation in the characterization of fecundity, and prenatal selection in particular. We argue that such innovation is crucial for expanding knowledge of the fetal origins of later life health. Pregnancy loss is common, responsive to environmental factors, and closely related to maternal and fetal health outcomes. As a result, selection into live birth is driven by many of the same exposures that shape the health trajectories of survivors. Lifecourse effects that are inferred without accounting for these dynamics may be significantly distorted by survival bias. We use a set of Monte Carlo simulations with realistic parameters to examine the implications of prenatal survival bias. We find that even in conservatively specified scenarios, true fetal origin effects can be underestimated by 50% or more. In contrast, effects of exposures that reduce the probability of prenatal survival but improve the health of survivors will be overestimated. The absolute magnitude of survival bias can even exceed small effect sizes, resulting in inferences that beneficial exposures are harmful or vice-versa. We also find reason for concern that moderately sized true effects, underestimated due to failure to account for selective survival, are missing from scientific knowledge because they do not clear statistical significance filters. This bias has potential real-world costs; policy decisions about interventions to improve maternal and infant health will be affected by underestimated program impact.
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