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Developing and Evaluating New Methods for Assessing Concurrent Environmental Exposures
Citation:
Gray, S., J. S. JAGAI, AND L. Messer. Developing and Evaluating New Methods for Assessing Concurrent Environmental Exposures. Presented at 3rd North American Congress of Epidemiology, Montreal, QC, CANADA, June 21 - 24, 2011.
Impact/Purpose:
The purpose of this symposium is to explore the methods currently being developed and evaluated for combining multiple exposures within a single medium (air domain and water domain used as examples) and across multiple media domains (air, water, land, built environment, and social determinants).
Description:
Summary of purpose and scope (no longer than 200 words): One limitation to current environmental health research is the focus on single contaminant exposures. Each exposure estimated in epidemiologic models accounts for a relatively small proportion of observed variance in health outcomes and represents only one possible contributor to health and disease. Well-designed environmental studies need to balance collecting sufficient depth of high quality and expensive data against the breadth, or number, of people on whom data can be collected. This tradeoff frequently results in studies comprising a small number of participants on whom a variety of high-quality exposure metrics are taken or a study with measurement of a small number of exposure metrics on a large number of participants. The purpose of this symposium is to explore the methods currently being developed and evaluated for combining multiple exposures within a single medium (air domain and water domain used as examples) and across multiple media domains (air, water, land, built environment, and social determinants). Discussants will describe how existing ambient level data are being used in unique ways for environmental assessment, evaluate the sensitivity of various exposure surrogates, and confer on methodologies being used to combine disparate environmental data to construct enhanced environmental exposures for use with human health outcome analyses. (Does not reflect EPA policy)