Polish and Proud?! Join a UIUC and Jagiellonian Research Project!

Sto Lat! Health and Hormones is a research project that wants you!

Scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland have teamed up to investigate women's reproductive health in Poland and the USA. Recruiting is ongoing right now - check if you qualify!

Here are some frequently asked questions:

Q: Why are you doing this research with Polish and Polish American women?

A: Reproductive hormones affect things like being able to have a baby and health risks, such as risk for breast cancer and osteoporosis. There are heritable, genetic effects on fertility, but environment and lifestyle also plays a big role in affecting your menstrual cycle.

We are really interested in the effects of different environments on women’s reproductive health. Looking at related populations in two different places is one way to help answer questions about how environmental factors affect human reproduction.

Our lab spent the past two summers in a rural region of southern Poland where many people grow up and live or work on small farms. In the U.S., we are recruiting in urban and suburban centers, where women are likely living very different lifestyles. Doing this research with Polish and Polish American women helps us look at a lot of different environmental and genetic effects on reproductive traits!

Q: What do you hope to learn?

A: We are learning more about menstrual cycle hormones and how environment and early life experiences can affect these hormones later in life. We are looking at things like physical activity, body composition, and genetics. This research is important for things like understanding what factors help a woman have a successful pregnancy, breast cancer risk, osteoporosis risk, and simply knowing more about normal variation in menstrual cycles. Most women don’t have menstrual cycles with hormone patterns that look exactly like the ones you learned in biology textbooks!

Q: What do participants do?

A: We have two study options. In both options, women will fill out surveys about their health and environment. We will take measurements of women’s body size, including height, weight, body fat, and circumferences of bust, waist, and hips. Women will provide saliva and cheek swab samples for DNA analysis, and we will do a blood draw to measure markers of bone turnover. Women will also record physical activity and sleep in a daily calendar, wear a physical activity tracker (a FitBit), and fill out diet recall forms. For the first of study option, this calendar is only one week long. In the second (and more exciting!) option, women will fill out the calendar for a full menstrual cycle (about one month) and also collect a urine sample every morning. These urine samples will be used to measure reproductive hormones.

Q: Is this a large time commitment?

A: This study only takes about 5-15 minutes every day for about one month. We will also meet with you three times over the course of the study. At the first meeting, we will explain the full study, conduct surveys, take measurements, and collect saliva and cheek samples. At the second meeting, a certified phlebotomist will conduct a blood-draw. Lastly, we will meet to collect your urine samples and take some body measurements again. While the first meeting takes about 1 1/2 hours, the other meetings will take less than thirty minutes.

Q: Will I get anything for participating?

A: All women who participate will receive a t-shirt. You can check it out on our Facebook page. Women who participate in the study option with urine collections will also receive a $70 gift card as thanks for participating.

Q: Have you found anything yet?

A: Yes! We have finished some of this research in Poland. So far, we have investigated relationships between childhood environment and timing of reproductive traits. We found that women who grew up on farms had later ages at first menstruation (menarche). A lot of people think of genes or DNA as being set and unchangeable. In reality, your genes interact with your environment. In other words, different exposures can affect people on a genetic level! We have found that childhood farming interacts with DNA methylation (one way DNA is modifiable) at a gene related to estrogen to affect this age at first menstruation. This is cool because the timing of menarche is important for adult estrogen levels, too. We are excited to see if methylation at this gene affects adult estrogen!

We also found out that an enzyme produced when bone is being built (called bone alkaline phosphatase) is positively associated with body fat. We are excited to look more into whether this effect might be due to the fact that levels of body fat are often associated with the reproductive hormone estrogen. Estrogen is known to affect the cells that build bone.

Q: How can I join?!?

A: First, check your eligibility. We are specifically looking for women who are:

• second or third generation Polish American women. This means that your parents or grandparents were born in Poland, but you were born in the United States
• aged 18-45*
• in good overall health
• non-smoking
• not pregnant or nursing
• not on hormonal contraceptives (birth control pills, implants, ring, etc)

Next, register at bit.ly/StoLat for the first study option (full menstrual cycle with urine collections). If you want to do the second (week-long) study option, please register here: https://illinois.edu/sb/sec/869113.

Have any more questions? We would love to hear from you! Contact us at: rogers10@illinois.edu, 331-253-2065, or Facebook message us at www.facebook.com/StoLatHealthAndHormones.