Figure 1.

Design and steps of the epidemiologic analyses. Step 1 provides information on changes for 348 specific CpGs found in Th1, Th2, Th17, and Treg immune genes described in Table 1. In Step 1 we checked each CpG of different genes individually. In Step 2, we tested whether the 348 CpGs of genes involved in T cell pathways changed more frequently from prepregnancy to early or late pregnancy than randomly selected CpGs from non-T cell-pathways. The two comparison groups of CpGs included first, 10 subsets of randomly selected CpGs from all other non-T cell-pathways CpGs, and second, 10 subsets of randomly selected CpGs from other CD4+-genes (immune-related genes) [58].