Grantee Research Project Results
2019 Progress Report: Southeast Wisconsin Interdisciplinary Study of Childrens Health, Ecological Exposures and Social Environment
EPA Grant Number: R839278Title: Southeast Wisconsin Interdisciplinary Study of Childrens Health, Ecological Exposures and Social Environment
Investigators: Magzamen, Sheryl , Carter, Ellison , Jathar, Shantanu , Wilson, Ander , Dilworth-Bart, Janean E
Institution: Colorado State University , University of Wisconsin - Madison
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: January 1, 2018 through December 31, 2020 (Extended to December 31, 2022)
Project Period Covered by this Report: January 1, 2019 through December 31,2019
Project Amount: $600,000
RFA: Using a Total Environment Framework (Built, Natural, Social Environments) to Assess Life-long Health Effects of Chemical Exposures (2017) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Human Health
Objective:
Objective 1: Develop community- and individual-level profiles for social, physical, and chemical environments and determine the relative associations of these exposure profiles with respiratory, neurodevelopmental, and injury-related outcomes in preschool children in Southeast Wisconsin.
Objective 2: Evaluate the role of community-level social and physical environmental profiles on modification of the effect of chemical exposures on children’s respiratory and neurodevelopmental-related outcomes.
Objective 3: Evaluate the role of residential mobility on respiratory, neurodevelopmental, and physical health in preschool children in Southeast Wisconsin.
Progress Summary:
Our outputs for Year 2 of the project were slowed by new staffing at Wisconsin Department of Health Services, limiting our ability to obtain our full dataset. Thanks to work by our partners in the Wisconsin Childhood Lead Prevention Poisoning Program, Ms. Marjorie Coons (director) and Ms. Maeve Pell (epidemiologist), we have progressed in linking our approved lead and WIC data to the Medicaid data for our study. We have also received approval to receive three years of birth cohort data (2012, 2013, 2014) that will allow us to expand our analysis.
Neighborhood Chemical Environment Factors
The latest version of the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model with updated emissions inventories will be used to model the air pollutant exposure over Milwaukee, WI to support the development and application of the total environmental framework. We are currently working with researchers at the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium (LADCO; Zac Adelman) to use their high resolution emissions inventory (1.33 km) over the Great Lakes region.
Before the updated CMAQ model is applied to the greater Milwaukee region, we evaluated outputs from CMAQ version 5.0.2 over the state of Colorado for several different pollutants (O3, PM2.5, NO2, and SO2) over a representative summer and winter month for 2011. This exercise was vital in helping train the graduate student in the operation of CMAQ and analysis of model outputs. The model appears to predict the 8-hour maximum average O3 to within a factor of 2 for both summer and winter months. The model performance is similar for PM2.5 but PM2.5 is over predicted in the urban Front Range for the winter month. Few measurements are available to evaluate NO2 and SO2. The model seems to do reasonably well (within a factor of 2) for both pollutants but overestimates by more than a factor of 2 at an urban site in Denver. A similar evaluation will need to be conducted over the Great Lakes region before the model output is used for further analysis. Below, we provide an example of the ratio of PM2.5 monitoring stations to CMAQ outputs.
Future Activities:
Title: Designing a framework for assessing the influence of physical built environment on respiratory, neurodevelopmental, and injury-related outcomes in children.
Housing is an integral part of the built environment and influences physical and mental health in diverse ways. Physical features (built and natural) in the residential environment affect children’s health and development. Yet, a lack of standardized tools and methods for measuring neighborhood environments and features across diverse urban and rural areas presents a barrier to deeper knowledge of what physical built environment features can promote good health and how they do so.
Our research aimed to: (i) develop community- and individual-level exposure profiles for features of the physical built environment and (ii) determine the relative effect of these exposure profiles on respiratory, neurodevelopmental, and injury-related outcomes in children living in two Wisconsin counties (Milwaukee and Racine) from 2014 to 2018. To develop the physical built environment exposure profiles, we assigned features to five different domains: land use (e.g. residential buildings, river, roads and highways), neighborhood density (e.g. schools, gas stations, restaurants), housing characteristics (e.g. year built, fireplace, garage attachment), and the distance from residential homes to nearby major roads (e.g. primary highway with limited access (A1), primary road without limited access (A2), secondary and connecting road(A3)). We further included a walkability score as an additional standalone feature, which is determined using walk score algorithm to score a location on a 0 to 100 scale based on density and variety of nearby commercial properties. We then used a machine learning approach to characterize the physical built environment for every census block group in Milwaukee and Racine counties, Wisconsin. We evaluated associations between the physical built environment exposure indices we developed and time-averaged concentrations of pollutants such as PM2.5, ozone, and lead (Pb) over our spatial unit of analysis, census tracts. We further evaluated the contribution of the built environment makes on children’s respiratory and neurodevelopmental health outcomes, adjusting for other established social and environmental health risk factors.
Our work creates a physical built environment scoring index that has potential to be used as a tool in population-based public health research to understand environment, housing, and health interactions. Here, we integrated output from our built environment exposure index with chemical and social environmental exposure-response models. This allowed us to better understand relationships between total environmental exposures and adverse child health outcomes and to inform evidence-based population health policy.
Title: How can we move the needle? A cross-disciplinary approach for healthy homes in the US
In 2009, the U.S. Surgeon General put out a call to action for healthy homes, motivated by a renewed interest by the public health community. Yet, progress towards healthy homes was sidelined as the U.S. recovered from the 2008 global economic recession and housing affordability and accessibility dominated housing research, policy, and public discussion. Renewed attention to the state of housing quality is warranted in light of events like the lead crisis in Flint (MI) and observations that some hazards in the home (e.g., falls and indoor air pollution) have become more severe during the ten-year period following the Surgeon General’s call. Here, we present a multidisciplinary framework to healthy homes with interventions and solutions to address several topical challenges in making U.S. homes healthier are described through this cross-disciplinary lens. Changes in national demographics, individual behaviors, and environmental changes since the 'Call to Action' are also included along with this revived call to action for making U.S. homes healthy.
Journal Articles on this Report : 3 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
Other project views: | All 8 publications | 7 publications in selected types | All 6 journal articles |
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Mork D, Kioumourtzoglou MA, Weisskopf M, Coull BA, Wilson A. Heterogeneous Distributed Lag Models to Estimate Personalized Effects of Maternal Exposures to Air Pollution. ARXIV PREPRINT ARXIV 2019;13763. |
R839278 (2019) R839278 (Final) R835872 (Final) |
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Martenies SE, Akherati A, Jathar S, Magzamen S. Health and environmental justice implications of retiring two coal‐fired power plants in the southern Front Range region of Colorado. GeoHealth 2019;3(9):266-283. |
R839278 (2019) |
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Hoskovec L, Benka-Coker W, Severson R, Magzman S, Wilson A. Model choice for estimating the association between exposure to chemical mixtures and health outcomes:A simulation study. PLOS ONE 2021;16(3):e0249236. |
R839278 (2019) |
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Supplemental Keywords:
Medicaid, lead, children, injury, respiratory, neurocognitive, coarsened exact matching, machine learning, indoor air quality, residential mobility, WICProgress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.