Grantee Research Project Results

Research Centers
Columbia University School of Public Health

Columbia University in the City of New York

The mission of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health (CCCEH) is to undertake a comprehensive community-based assessment of environmental risks to infants and children, and to develop strategies for reducing, and ultimately preventing, those risks. The Center is responsive to the urgent health needs of the minority communities in Northern Manhattan and the South Bronx, which suffer uniquely high rates of asthma, adverse birth outcomes, impaired development, and other diseases. These communities also have disproportionately heavy exposure to environmental pollutants, which may contribute to these adverse health outcomes.

Community participation is an integral component of both the Center's organizational structure and its research projects. We anticipate that research results will aid the development of community-based strategies to reduce and ultimately prevent asthma and developmental impairment in the target population, and will have implications for the control of these health risks in other inner-city, minority communities. Thus, the Center is responsive to the need for environmental justice.

The Center utilizes an innovative approach -molecular epidemiology - to answer questions regarding environmental impacts on children's health. Biomarkers will be used in conjunction with questionnaires, individual exposure assessment, clinical evaluations, and quantitative measures of community-level risk factors to evaluate exposure, susceptibility, and risk from the environmental toxicants of concern, and to monitor the efficacy of intervention. The main hypotheses of the Center are that: 1) prenatal and postnatal environmental exposures to airborne particulate matter (PM), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), and home allergens (cockroach, house dust mite and rodent) increase the risk of asthma and/or developmental impairment in these disadvantaged communities; 2) inadequate nutritional status exacerbates the impact of these environmental toxicants; and 3) a community-based intervention to reduce these toxic exposures and improve nutritional status can reduce the risk of disease.

To test these hypotheses and meet its objective, the Center is undertaking three interrelated research studies, all of which build on a prospective cohort of 400 African American and Dominican mothers and their newborn infants living in Washington Heights, Harlem and the South Bronx. The research studies (described in detail below) include projects that investigate the impact of environmental pollutants and allergens on: 1) growth and development; and 2) asthma. The third research study investigates the impact of community and home-based interventions to reduce toxicant and allergen exposure, as well as risk of asthma.

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