Distinguished Lecturer Hobbs Sees Progress in Fight Against Birth Defects

Charlotte Hobbs, M.D., (left) and UAMS College of Medicine Dean Debra H. Fiser, M.D.

Nov. 14, 2008 | UAMS birth defects expert Charlotte Hobbs, M.D., Ph.D., knows how far science has come in helping babies born with any of the 30 or more types of birth defects.

Her mother was treated for a birth defect in Canada 80 years ago, Hobbs noted as she introduced her Dean’s Distinguished Scholar Lecture. Now many of those problems can be detected before birth.

She told of a mother tested 20 weeks into a recent pregnancy who found her child would be born with a heart defect. After multiple surgeries and a five-month hospital stay, the eight month-old infant is now home.

“It’s because of babies like that that we continue to do the work that we do,” said Hobbs, the Pamela D. Stephens Endowed Chair for Birth Defects Research at UAMS, director of the Arkansas Center for Birth Defects Research and Prevention, and associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics, and Section Chief of Birth Defects Research in the UAMS College of Medicine.

Hobbs, a native Canadian joined the faculty after completing her residency at UAMS, opened her lecture by talking about her family.  

Later in life, her mom conceived seven times. The first was stillborn and there were two miscarriages amid the births of Hobbs and her siblings, one of whom sat in the lecture audience.

“I learned from an early age that you don’t take healthy pregnancies for granted,” said Hobbs in introducing her presentation, “From the Bench to the Crib: Searching for the Cause of Birth Defects.”

Today, a child is born in Arkansas every 14 minutes, Hobbs said.

“Every five hours a child is born in Arkansas with a birth defect and every four days, a child dies in Arkansas due to a birth defect,” she said.

Suspected causes of birth defects have changed as technology and medical science has advanced, she said. Early beliefs pointed to birth defects as punishment from the gods or a sign of demonic activity.

As late as the 1930s, Hobbs said, it was believed that emotional stimuli experienced by a pregnant woman left a “maternal impression” that caused the problems in the child.

Thanks to a movement to track birth defects, researchers have homed in on more specific causes for the problems.

Now, she said, categories of birth defect causes have emerged, including genetics, environmental factors such as exposure to certain substances and lifestyle factors such as smoking or alcohol consumption by the mother.

Continued advances in the ability to identify changes in genes will give researchers the ability to isolate those changes associated with birth defects, Hobbs said.

Hobbs is now focusing a lot of her energy on the largest ever investigation of child health, the National Children’s Study. Hobbs, through the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute — a UAMS affiliate, will lead a $14.4 million National Institutes of Health study of children born in Arkansas’ Benton County.

The National Children’s Study will follow a representative national sample of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21. Study volunteers will be recruited throughout the United States, from rural, urban and suburban areas, from all income and educational levels, and from all racial groups. The study will investigate factors influencing the development of such conditions as autism, cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, birth defects, diabetes, asthma and obesity.