Grantee Research Project Results

Final Report: Southeast Wisconsin Interdisciplinary Study of Childrens Health, Ecological Exposures and Social Environment

EPA Grant Number: R839278
Title: 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 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.

Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):

The progress of our grant was severely hindered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our primary partner for data acquisition, Wisconsin Department of Health Services (WDHS), marshalled many of the department’s resources to respond to the pandemic, challenging our ability to build our desired data set with data from the Wisconsin Childhood Lead Prevention Poisoning Program (WCLPPP), Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program, and Wisconsin Medicaid Program. Though Dr. Magzamen had served part of her time as a postdoctoral fellow at WDHS and participated in some data merger projects (e.g., the Wisconsin Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program collaborates with the Medicaid Program to determine if lead screening has been conducted for children enrolled in the Medicaid program by alerting practitioners with Medicaid clients an annual report card of their testing rates) as academic partners outside of WDHS operations, we were humbled by the internal mechanisms that required collaboration between two programs within the Division of Public Health (WCLPP and WIC) with the Medicaid programs (Division of Medicaid Services), with data mergers conducted by a third entity (Office of Health Informatics). We approached this grant unprepared for the data harmonization needs to create the dataset for our project. We maintain our working group with representatives from these three programs with the goal of creating our planned analytic dataset and will seek funding in the future to analyze the harmonized dataset.

 

Due our previous collaboration with the Wisconsin Childhood Lead Prevention Poisoning Program, we have been successful about collaborating with the program manager to acquire data to address the following questions:

• Redlining and lead exposure
• Intergenerational lead exposure among Milwaukee residents

The overall goal of the study is to evaluate exposure at critical developmental windows (e.g., prenatal period, early infancy), as well as cumulative exposure on the multiple environmental dimensions to understand the joint and individual impacts of the exposures. The study population would be children who are enrolled in WIC and Medicaid, considered to be highly vulnerable to the influence of the environment. Data would inform potential policies to remediate exposures and associated health outcomes.

Our specific aim for this component of the study is to evaluate the role of intergenerational transmission of lead exposure. There is a body of evidence that harsh social and physical environments have significant detrimental impacts on intergenerational economic mobility. Yet, little is known about the consistency of exposures to these environments for mother and child and how this lack of mobility, both physical and economic, can lead to intergenerational lead exposure. We can use this unique study population to investigate the long-term health and behavioral issues of childhood lead exposure to answer the following question: is maternal exposure to lead as a child associated with the intergenerational risk of childhood blood lead levels?

Journal Articles on this Report : 1 Displayed | Download in RIS Format

Publications Views

Other project views:	All 8 publications	7 publications in selected types	All 6 journal articles

Publications

Type	Citation	Project	Document Sources
Journal Article	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) R835872C002 (Final)	Full-text: Taylor & Francis - Full Text HTML Exit

Progress and Final Reports:

Original Abstract

2018 Progress Report

2019 Progress Report

2020 Progress Report

2021 Progress Report