Pilot Study to Assess the Health Effects from Cyanobacteria Exposure using Electronic Health Record Data: Classifying Exposure
Citation:
Lavery, A., B. Schaeffer, J. Murray, A. Koch, E. Hilborn, S. Boerger, K. Loftin, B. Seegers, R. Stumpf, J. Graham, J. Runkle, L. DAnglada, AND L. Backer. Pilot Study to Assess the Health Effects from Cyanobacteria Exposure using Electronic Health Record Data: Classifying Exposure. US HAB symposium, Albany, NY, October 23 - 28, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
Initial study to investigate if there are human health responses from aerosolized cyanobacteria toxins.
Description:
The objective of this pilot study is to evaluate whether electronic health record (EHR) systems can be used to study respiratory effects associated with exposure to aerosolized cyanobacterial toxin exposure. We aimed to evaluate if whether we can detect an increase in healthcare visits for asthma exacerbations or allergic rhinitis when cyanobacterial blooms are present. We utilized data from the Cyanobacteria Assessment Network (CyAN) data to determine when a bloom was present or absent in three lake areas within Wisconsin between 2017-2019. Methods were developed to classify exposures in lake-surrounding zip codes over time. This presentation will share the unique challenges in classifying potential exposures, show data and visualizations used to develop the classifications, and highlight the sensitivity analyses that lead to finalizing methods to compare environmental data to health outcome data.
