Please join Wayne State University's Center for Leadership in Environmental Awareness and Research (CLEAR) and Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors (CURES) for their upcoming virtual seminar on October 9, 2025 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. The seminar is free; registration is required. The Zoom link will be emailed to all registrants prior to the seminar.

The speaker will be Dr. Allen J. Wilcox, an epidemiologist specializing in the biology of human reproduction, former editor-in-chief of the journal Epidemiology and longtime member of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. He will present "On the Study of Fetal Growth Restriction, Time to Abandon SGA."

Abstract:

Fetal growth restriction (FGR) is defined as the failure of the fetus to reach its growth potential. Fetuses and newborns with FGR have severe wasting and increased risk of morbidity and mortality. The difficulty with studying FGR is that it lacks a gold-standard definition. There is no way to measure “potential” growth, and clinicians have not been able to agree on definitive criteria for FGR. As a surrogate measure, researchers routinely define FGR as the smallest 10% of infants at each gestational age.

There are problems with the use of Small for Gestational Age (SGA) to define FGR. Many babies are SGA but constitutionally small and healthy. Conversely, babies destined to be large at birth may suffer from FGR and still be larger than the 10% percentile cut point. It is now apparent that conclusions about FGR using SGA studies are misleading. Recent work exploring FGR without defining it as SGA suggests that FGR is much more rare and far more dangerous than previously realized. Progress in understanding FGR will depend on the development of criteria that do not depend on SGA.

Biography:

Allen Wilcox is an epidemiologist who studies the biology of human reproduction. His research has addressed infertility, early pregnancy loss, fetal growth restriction, birth defects, and neurologic disabilities. His work is the basis for phone apps used by more than 40 million women to monitor their fertility.

He has spent his career at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), one of the National Institutes of Health in Durham, North Carolina, with adjunct professorships at the University of North Carolina, Harvard University and the University of Bergen in Norway. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal Epidemiology for 14 years and has served as president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and the American Epidemiological Society.

Since his retirement in 2019, he has continued research collaborations with scientists in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. He is the author of a popular textbook in his specialty published by Oxford University Press, with a new edition in 2025. He holds an M.D. from the University of Michigan, a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, and an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Bergen.