The Creation of a Weight of Evidence Scoring Database for Risk Factors for Adverse Impacts to Birth Outcomes Using Expert Elicitation.

BACKGROUND: Adverse birth outcomes are important public health measures and account for a substantial public health burden. There is considerable diversity of these health endpoints, as well as in the many factors suspected or recognized to increase their risk. This diversity renders it challenging to synthesize the totality of the evidence by carrying out a systematic review. METHODS: We undertook an expert elicitation to characterize the state of the literature on this topic, the interconnections amongst risk factors, and identify those that are a priority for future research. A panel of 30 scientists and physicians with expertise in birth outcome epidemiology were solicited to identify a series of health outcomes, and associated risk factors. RESULTS: This resulted in a listing of 15 birth outcomes, and 247 possible risk factors in total, with varying numbers of risk factors for each health outcome. Each panel member was asked to score the weight of evidence (WOE) of each risk factor and birth outcome combination (n = 1127) on a scale of 1 (no evidence) to 5 (strong evidence) for which the expert had a working knowledge of the literature. Not all experts scored each/every outcome/risk factor combination, reflecting the different types of expertise on the panel. The compilation of these WOE scores was used to create a publicly available database for birth outcomes risk factors (https://scipinion-rfbo.onrender.com) that is intended to be updated over time so as to serve as an up to date resource for the research and medical community. CONCLUSIONS: This expert approach serves as a unique and valuable approach to data reduction that can help to inform research priorities, while providing an open access resource to identify risk factors that may act as confounders and/or modifiers in future epidemiology studies and clinical trials.