Grantee Research Project Results
Health Effects Institute (2020-2025): A Partnership on the Health Effects of Air Pollution
EPA Grant Number: CR839981Title: Health Effects Institute (2020-2025): A Partnership on the Health Effects of Air Pollution
Investigators: Greenbaum, Daniel S.
Institution: Health Effects Institute
EPA Project Officer: Keating, Terry
Project Period: April 1, 2020 through March 31, 2025
Project Amount: $25,000,000
RFA: Health Effect Institute (HEI) (2020) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Air , Air Quality and Air Toxics , Airborne Particulate Matter Health Effects , Human Health
Description:
The Health Effects Institute is an independent nonprofit corporation chartered to "conduct . . . and to evaluate research and testing related to the health effects of emissions from motor vehicles, and other environmental pollutants, and to provide the results to the public and interested governmental agencies." Since 1980, HEI has been funded through a partnership of the U.S. EPA and the worldwide motor vehicle industry. In addition, other public and private organizations in the United States and around the world have supported special projects or research programs.
This Plan describes the potential HEI research program and review activities for the health effects of air pollution for the period of 2020 through 2025. We have attempted to identify and anticipate major questions on the health effects of pollutants and new technologies that are likely to be facing policymakers, industry, and others. Based on input from HEI stakeholders, the plan presents an integrated set of strategies designed to guide HEI in developing detailed annual research and review plans that will deliver research results on potential health effects of greatest concern for decisions in a timely manner.
Objective:
HEI's mission is to provide public and private decision makers with independent, impartial, timely, and high-quality science on the health effects of emissions from motor vehicles, fuels, and other sources of environmental pollution. HEI accomplishes its mission by seeking to achieve six principal goals:
- To identify the areas of highest priority for health effects research on pollutants and issues of greatest concern and that respond to the rapidly changing public and technological environment.
- To fund and oversee the conduct of high-quality research in the priority areas, fostering whenever possible integrated and multi-institute efforts.
- To conduct, as needed, intensive reanalyses of studies, datasets, and methods that are at the center of important policy decisions.
- To provide independent review of HEI-supported research and reanalysis that evaluates, summarizes, and enhances the understanding and credibility of the results.
- To integrate HEI's research results with those of other institutions into coherent broader evaluations of the health effects of a pollutant, source, or technology.
- To communicate the results of HEI research and analyses to public and private decision makers and the scientific community in an understandable and timely manner.
Approach:
HEI’s 2020-2025 plan is organized around four core themes:
- Accountability: Testing the Links Between Air Quality Action and Health – building on HEI’s accountability studies on key actions to improve air quality, exploring questions such as better methods for testing such links, whether such research helps us test for causality and how they might help improve cost and benefit analyses for future actions. Studies soon to be initiated under a new Request for Applications (RFA) will address some of these questions but, given the complex nature of this issue, more research is clearly needed. In particular, we will examine how best to assess the effectiveness of further air quality improvements at low ambient concentrations.
- Complex Questions for the Air Pollution Mixture – The difficult issues surrounding the complex air pollution mixture continue to challenge scientists and decision makers alike. HEI’s studies examining health effects at low exposures are testing concentration response relationships at the lowest levels and HEI’s new RFA on exposure will seek and launch studies using sensors and other new techniques to measure exposure to pollutants exhibiting a great deal of spatial and temporal variability (NOx, UFP, etc.). To shed better light on the many questions that such research is raising, HEI will – at the earliest stages of the new Plan - ask experts to answer the question Where can science best contribute? Are there mechanistic studies needed to better understand complex exposures, and/or should HEI re-visit PM component and source-specific exposures and their differential effects? Are there new, more effective techniques to accomplish this?
- Transport and Urban Health – A host of new innovations and other changes are making inroads and changing the future of transportation, even as the internal combustion engine will be in use for many years, and issues of in-use, sea- and airport emissions, non-tail-pipe, and other kinds of emissions continue. New questions are arising in this context, such as the health effects of ultrafine particles (UFP), as well as the role of factors such as noise, socioeconomic status, and access to green space. Anticipating the many diverse and potentially disruptive changes in transport, targeting the most significant continuing questions, and placing transport in the broader setting of urban health, will be key priorities for HEI going forward.
- Global Health – In the developing world, especially India and China, and elsewhere in Asia, rapid growth has raised levels of air pollution from all sources, and health science and policy decisions are just beginning to catch up to the challenge. With additional funding, HEI will continue and enhance its world-leading efforts to produce and communicate the results of Global Burden of Disease from outdoor air pollution, and produce improved science on the health effects of air pollution in developing countries, and a global analysis of the contributions to air pollution burdens from each source for every country in the world (GBDMAPS Global).
Along with the opportunities mentioned above, we have identified a number of other issues that cross-cut our programs. Most prominent among such issues is Transparency in Policy-Relevant Science which has three major components:
- Data access and transparency are essential to the scientific process, providing insight into analytical and methodological details. Making data and analytical methods available allows others to replicate study results independently and, where necessary, perform alternative or additional analyses. As such, transparency provides equally valuable feedback to the decision-making process. HEI maintains a strong policy on facilitating access to underlying data and methods for the studies it funds; this will be a hallmark of the HEI Plan 2020–2025.
- Systematic review of the scientific literature. The process for performing and synthesizing reviews has been evolving and currently the use of systematic review protocols has been emphasized in the environmental health context. HEI is refining and implementing these enhanced efforts in its reviews of the traffic literature and will target ways to further improve these practices in 2020-2025.
- Testing and Evaluating Statistical Methods has been a hallmark of HEI’s implementation of all of its research programs. This effort will continue in 2020-2025 with particular emphasis on new methods for causal inference and other enhanced statistical techniques.
Expected Results:
Accountability: Testing the Links Between Air Quality Action and Health
To effectively carry out the next generation of accountability research, and consistent with other areas of the Application/Plan, HEI will strengthen its ability to track and take advantage of upcoming regulatory interventions in Europe and the US:
- First, HEI will complete and communicate the results of two accountability studies it has underway, examining the potential impacts of major interventions to improve air quality such as:
- implementation of the California Goods Movement plan
- transportation emission reductions in the United States and Canada.
Special attention will be paid to communicating the lessons learned to inform future decisions
- Second, HEI will launch new targeted studies, aimed at key interventions and opportunities, e.g. major interventions to reduce emissions from utilities and industrial sources; school bus retrofits; changes in household energy use; local traffic interventions; and efforts to reduce exposure for at-risk communities
- Third, HEI will conduct a multi-stakeholder workshop to examine what are the lessons from the challenges faced in the conduct of previous studies and how may these lessons be incorporated in the design of new studies, in particular at the low and high end of the concentration-response curve.
Complex Questions for the Air Pollution Mixture
In this important area HEI will, first and foremost, bring the major programs it has underway to timely completion and launch key studies already in the pipeline. These include:
- The Effects of Exposure to Low Pollution Levels
- Studies of At-Risk populations and efforts to apply new methods to test causality
- New Studies of Exposure to difficult to characterize pollutants such as NOx, Ozone, and Ultrafine Particles, and
- Continue to regularly test and evaluate statistical methods applied throughout HEI’s science.
At the same time, HEI will step back briefly at the start of the Plan to convene an Expert Panel to answer a basic question before launching new targeted research: What future questions can Science best answer? This Panel will at the start of implementing the Plan advise HEI on the best approaches to several important questions:
- Should HEI further test the effects of low levels of exposure on health, including potentially
- Follow-on epidemiologic analyses from HEI’s initial large studies; and
- Potential mechanistic studies to test effects at low levels of exposure?
- Can we build on HEI’s NPACT studies of the toxicity of PM components to identify whether there are new, effective ways to further probe this important question?
Depending on the results for that Expert Panel, HEI will design and implement targeted programs of research to address one or more of these important topics.
Transport and Urban Health
To provide time-sensitive information about the full range of potential effects of exposure to traffic, to place that information in its broader urban context, and to anticipate potential new mobility changes, HEI will
- Complete and broadly communicate the work of the HEI Expert Panel on Traffic Exposure and Effects
- Finish, peer review, and disseminate the results of HEI’s current studies placing transport in the broader context of noise, socioeconomic status, and green space
- Assess key emissions and fuels issues and conduct targeted assessment as needed
- Evaluate and take action to better understand the potential exposures and health effects from non-tailpipe emissions such as tire and brake wear; and
- Track and assess rapidly emerging trends in new vehicle technologies and use patterns (i.e. “new mobility”) and regularly evaluate whether there are important HEI relevant questions arising.
Global Health
HEI will continue to inform developed-world decisions by seeking to:
- Target HEI research to projected US, EU and other international policy trends and timelines, in the process strengthening bridges among HEI and international policy makers to enhance integration of HEI science into key science decision documents
- Participate on key science oversight and evaluation groups for highly relevant studies (e.g. Worldwide Air Quality Guidelines and the Global Burden of Disease updates)
In the developing countries of Asia and elsewhere HEI will, with added resources,
- Apply the GBD to estimating burdens from specific sources globally
- Complete current and selectively undertake new studies as funding becomes available, including the potential long-term effects of exposure to higher levels of pollution, in the process strengthening HEI’s ability to build science capacity
- Enhance HEI’s ability to communicate the results of its research to government, industry, development banks, and other stakeholders, building upon and improving its annual State of Global Air initiative
Taken together these activities will maintain HEI as a domestically and globally relevant provider of independent science regularly called on to communicate on and credibly inform key decisions affecting public health and potential regulation in key international forums.
Cross-cutting Issues
In HEI’s planning, a number of specific health effects questions emerged that would not by themselves be programs of research in the new Application/Plan, but which should be viewed as cross-cutting issues that should be integrated into all of HEI’s work. These include:
- Transparency in Policy-Relevant Science, including
- Data Access and Transparency
- Systematic Synthesis of Information on Important Issues.
- Testing, and Evaluating Statistical methods, including:
- Testing Causality through Innovative Statistical Techniques
- Other Enhanced statistical techniques
- Enhanced Exposure Assessment
- Sensitive and at-Risk Populations
Publications and Presentations:
Publications have been submitted on this project: View all 37 publications for this projectJournal Articles:
Journal Articles have been submitted on this project: View all 12 journal articles for this projectRelevant Websites:
Progress and Final Reports:
The 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.