TIDES: The Infant Development and Enviroment study

What is TIDES?

Participation in The Infant Development and Environment Study (TIDES) began in 2011 when pregnant mothers were in their first trimester of pregnancy and ended shortly after birth for girl babies and at 1-year old for boy babies. During the first 5 years of TIDES, we enrolled almost 800 moms and their babies across four research study sites. Our study suggested that prenatal exposure to common chemicals in our diet and homes – phthalates, which make plastics soft and flexible – may affect reproductive tract development during pregnancy of boys, but not that of girls, and these results are affected by the amount of stress the moms reported during pregnancy.

Because of the success of TIDES I and the importance of these and other findings related to phthalate exposures, the National Institutes of Health funded our continuation study, TIDES II. This phase followed our TIDES kids during the ages of 4 years old to 6 years old and their moms. TIDES II was important because it gave us the opportunity to extend our knowledge beyond pregnancy and learn about the potential effects of prenatal and postnatal phthalates on the development of young children. We looked at how the environment and events occurring at ages 4 and 6 as well as during pregnancy affected a child’s growth, well-being and behavior.
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What Does TIDES Participation Involve?

TIDES III participant details coming soon!

TIDES Publications

Click here for a list of published TIDES articles.
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Click here for a list of U of M TIDES-specific published articles.
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Study Visit Location

All participant visits for TIDES take place at the Epidemiology Clinical Research Center (ECRC). The ECRC is a short distance from campus, easy to get to, and parking is free. Directions to ECRC.

ECRC-parking

2023 Update

Now that phase 1 of the TIDES ECHO Program is complete, we are venturing into TIDES 3, which is a newly funded phase of measurements that will be conducted when our TIDES kids are 12 and 14 years old. Similar to TIDES 2 and TIDES ECHO, the TIDES 3 study visits will include surveys, body measurements (height and weight), biospecimen collection (urine and blood), and airways measurements (spirometry and FeNO, which is short for Forced exhaled Nitric Oxide). We anticipate these visits to begin in early fall of 2023.

Also in 2023, we were finally able to share with our TIDES participants their personalized results for two chemical analyses – phthalates and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The chemicals analyzed were taken from the urine of our TIDES moms provided when they were pregnant with our TIDES kids (12 years ago)!

We would not be successful in our research if it was not for our amazing TIDES families. Our core TIDES staff members have worked together with the families since the TIDES kids were 6 years old. It has been so fun to watch them grow up, and we can’t wait to see everyone again at the TIDES 3 Age 12 visit!

TIDES All Sites Staff Photo

Here we are in Seattle for our all-sites TIDES 3 meeting in March 2023!

2022 Update

Due to the pandemic, our timeline was altered such that once our Age 8 visits were complete, we needed to quickly begin planning and scheduling our Age 9-10 visits. As we prepared for the Age 9-10 visits, we once again considered the comfort level of participants for conducting in-person visits. Most families felt comfortable coming into the clinic for their study visits, but for those who moved out of the area or who were more comfortable not participating in a face-to-face clinic visit, we conducted remote visits. By now, the TIDES kids were ‘pros’ at completing surveys and cognitive tests, and having their height, weight and other body measures taken, but for the first time in TIDES, we conducted venous blood draws on the kids who attended an in-person clinic visit. They were champs! Our TIDES families were so responsive to our scheduling requests that we completed almost all of the TIDES ECHO Age 9-10 visits by the end of the year!

To date, a number of papers have been written using ECHO data. In fact, Dr. Ruby Nguyen, our TIDES site Principal Investigator, recently published this paper that examined characteristics of individuals who use opioids during pregnancy. Published results are extensive and will continue to expand. Please click on the link for information on other published ECHO papers.

2020-2021 Update

In early 2020, the TIDES team was busy preparing for the TIDES ECHO Age 8 study visits when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and work and life as we knew it drastically changed. Once it was clear that working from home was going to last longer than originally anticipated, we began to brainstorm how to viably continue our research study and meet with our TIDES study participants! Understandably, we had to delay beginning the Age 8 visits by many months, and by the end of 2020, we began contacting our TIDES families to assess comfort level with study visits. We offered three options for TIDES families to choose from, which ranged from being comfortable with in-person visits at the study clinic to needing visits to be fully remote. Of the families living in the Twin Cities, over 75% chose to participate in person.

As 2021 got underway, two of our team members, Abby Gelineau and Stacey Moe, suited up in their PPE and began the Age 8 in-person visits with the families who chose to come into the clinic. In a matter of four months, Abby and Stacey conducted 73 in-person participant visits! During this same timeframe, our other two team members, Lauren Berg and Pam Carr-Manthe, conducted 39 visits with participants who chose to participate remotely. These visits were conducted via Zoom where Lauren or Pam worked with our TIDES kids to complete online surveys (the same surveys completed by the TIDES kids who worked with Abby and Stacey at the in-person visits!). Simultaneously, we mailed hair, toenail, tooth, and saliva biospecimen collection kits to participants’ homes where the TIDES families collected their biospecimens and returned them at their in-person visit or via mail.

TIDES Staff in PPE