{"doi":"10.17615/ggre-3g53","title":"Race, the Vaginal Microbiome, and Spontaneous Preterm Birth","abstract":"Previous studies have investigated the associations between the vaginal microbiome and preterm birth, with the aim of determining whether differences in community patterns meaningfully alter risk and could therefore be the target of intervention. We report on vaginal microbial analysis of a nested case-control subset of the Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition (PIN) Study, including 464 White women (375 term birth and 89 spontaneous preterm birth, sPTB) and 360 Black women (276 term birth and 84 sPTB). We found that the microbiome of Black women has higher alpha-diversity, higher abundance of Lactobacillus iners, and lower abundance of Lactobacillus crispatus. However, among women who douche, there were no significant differences in microbiome by race. The sPTB-associated microbiome exhibited a lower abundance of L. crispatus, while alpha diversity and L. iners were not significantly associated with sPTB. For each order of magnitude increase in the normalized relative abundance of L. crispatus, multivariable adjusted odds of sPTB decreased by approximately 20% (odds ratio, 0.81; 95% confidence interval, 0.70, 0.94). When we considered the impact of douching, associations between the microbiome and sPTB were limited to women who do not douche. We also observed strong intercorrelations between a range of maternal factors, including poverty, education, marital status, age, douching, and race, with microbiome effect sizes in the range of 1.8 to 5.2% in univariate models. Therefore, race may simply be a proxy for other socially driven factors that differentiate microbiome community structures. Future work will continue to refine reliable microbial biomarkers for preterm birth across diverse cohorts.","journal":"UNC Libraries","year":2023,"id":409896,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9269,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":377145,"name":"John M. Thorp","orcid":"0000-0002-4598-0271","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1007278,"name":"A.M. Siega-Riz","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":678962,"name":"Alicia A. Sorgen","orcid":"0000-0003-1892-7712","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":36379,"name":"Jennifer M. Fettweis","orcid":"0000-0001-5466-3000","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1012113,"name":"Miaoliang Wu","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":582343,"name":"Shumei S. Sun","orcid":"0000-0003-2945-4762","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":29050,"name":"Gregory A. Buck","orcid":"0000-0003-4621-3987","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":339701,"name":"Stephanie M. Engel","orcid":"0000-0002-3942-1246","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1189752,"name":"Kathrin Ludwig","orcid":"0000-0003-4619-4827","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":611653,"name":"Patricia V. Basta","orcid":null,"position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1190079,"name":"Eric Rosen","orcid":null,"position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":29081,"name":"Anthony A. Fodor","orcid":"0000-0002-9305-4264","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":247724,"name":"Ivory Blakley","orcid":"0000-0003-4532-6453","position":13,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":59345,"name":"Myrna G. Serrano","orcid":"0000-0003-4327-0193","position":14,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":548610,"name":"Nancy Dole","orcid":"0000-0002-2113-7984","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:21:31.144858Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}