National Children's Health Study

ES&P professor Tim Downs, GISDE professor Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger, and ES&P research professor Rob Goble will participate in the National Children’s Study: the largest and most ambitious long term study ever conducted on how environmental and genetic factors impact children’s health and development in the U.S. The study is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Nationwide, it will follow a representative sample of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21, seeking information on all aspects of their lives, including their genetic makeup, and their health. In Worcester County, 1,000 children will be followed. It is hoped that the study will lead to a better understanding, prevention and treatment of some of the nation’s most pressing health problems among children and young adults, including autism, asthma, birth defects, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

Clark University teamed up with University of Massachusetts Medical School to become one of 22 research centers across the country to implement the study, for which the nationwide budget in 2007 is $69 million. The IDCE team is responsible for analyzing the indoor and outdoor environments that children inhabit pre- and post-natally for toxic chemicals and pathogens, and for mapping different kinds of stressors and resources using Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

The project comes on the heels of IDCE’s involvement in the National Institutes of Health program “Environmental Justice: Partnerships for Communication”. Downs and Ross, co-PIs on the $890,000 grant in its final year of funding, have been committed to projects of enhancing broader participation in research by those at risk, and to facilitating communication among environmental health researchers, community health-care providers and community members. The 2004-2008 project, “Strengthening Vulnerable Communities in the Worcester Built Environment,” measured different types of environmental stressors, their impacts on health, and builds local capacity to respond. “In addition to environmental health risk assessment and health-related GIS, we bring experience of community-based participatory research (CBPR) from our existing NIH Environmental Justice partnership,” says Downs. “CBPR actively engages participants to improve our contextual understanding of health. It can also improve retention—a major challenge for a 21-year study—by engendering a sense of ownership of the project among mothers and children.”

For Ogneva-Himmelberger the Children Health Study also fits well with her ongoing collaboration with Fallon Clinic and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, on another NIH-funded project called “Proximity to Traffic, Air Toxic Exposures and the Development of Asthma in Children.” In this study she uses GIS tools to estimate the exposure to traffic-related pollution in children diagnosed with asthma.

Ogneva-Himmelberger says, “Putting information into a spatial context allows us to explore the spatial relationships among health and behavior indicators, environmental factors, and demographic and cultural characteristics at a particular location. GIS maps may indicate connections and trends that would be otherwise not readily apparent, if the data were in tabular format and not integrated together via spatial overlays.”