Children's Environmental Health And Disease Prevention Research Centers

Children's Environmental Health And Disease Prevention Research Centers

Posted by admin on Friday, March 26, 2004 - 12:59 PM

Young children undergo great physical and mental changes in just a few years. Exposure to lead is a well known cause of many problems in childhood development. But lead is just one of the many potential developmental toxins. Therefore, ongoing studies must be performed to assess what other environmental substances might trigger developmental problems. To address these issues, in 1988 Federal research programs devoted exclusively to children's environmental health and disease prevention were created. This joint effort by the NIEHS, the EPA, and the CDC uses the expertise and resources of nonprofit institutions across the Nation. These centers also work under the concept that research is more meaningful when the public has input and access to scientists. Public outreach is a cornerstone of the program, and community participation and sharing of information between local citizens and researchers are requirements of each center established
Recently, 4 new centers were funded. Two of the centers - at the University of California at Davis and at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey -- will study environmental factors that may be related to autism. A center at the University of Illinois at Champagne/Urbana will assess the impact of exposure to mercury and PCBs between two groups of Asian-Americans in Wisconsin, whose diets are heavy in fish from the Great Lakes. The fourth center, at Children's Hospital of Cincinnati, Ohio, will work with community participants to assess the impact of reducing pollutants in the home and neighborhood on children's hearing, behavior and test scores. Below is a summary of the research being conducted at each of the currently funded children's research centers. Columbia University School of Public Health This Center conducts community-based research and studies ways to prevent environmental risks to children. Molecular epidemiological methods are being used to investigate the relationship between health effects (e.g., asthma, developmental problems, cancer risk) and exposure in the womb and as infants to harmful air pollutants (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, particulate matter, diesel exhaust particulates, environmental tobacco smoke, pesticides, and indoor allergens). The Center also is studying prenatal and early postnatal risk factors in neurocognitive development, asthma etiology and cancer risk in 600 African American and Latina mothers and newborns. Another study was recently begun to examine potential health risks in 300 pregnant women and their newborns that may have been exposed prenatally to air pollution from the destruction of the World Trade Center. University of Southern California The Center at USC is studying how children's lungs are susceptible to air pollution, how environmental tobacco smoke causes allergic inflammation, and what measures can reduce allergies to cockroaches and dust mites and improve the health. The group being studied is a group of asthmatic children from different ethic backgrounds in Los Angeles. To accomplish these goals, the Center has three major studies of respiratory disease. Also, a community-based study on reducing asthma (the LA CASA study) is closely linked to the Center outreach program. One study is testing whether eating fruits and vegetables and taking antioxidants combined with understanding the genetic differences in genes involved in lung defenses can affect growth of lung function and increase respiratory illnesses caused by chronic exposure to ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and air particles. A second study is examining how environmental tobacco smoke affects allergic responses, by establishing controlled human and animal models and examining specific phases of the allergic antibody response relating to exposure to tobacco smoke. This Center also is developing and evaluating community-based methods to reduce environmental asthma triggers in the homes of inner-city children in Los Angeles. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine This Center focuses on general support for activities related to research, as well as on genetic mechanisms, airway inflammation, epidemiology, and community intervention studies. The general support component sponsored grants for newly recruited faculty members, the community advisory board, and the research conference program. The Community Advisory Board is active in the Center's studies and is now independently increasing communication between the Center and the community. The Center's studies on genetic mechanisms focus on how susceptible lung tissues are effects of ozone (O3). These studies complement previous ones that looked at the link between O3 and airway inflammation. Studies on airway inflammation are establishing whether exposure to particulate matter is related to asthma symptoms and how these exposures increase asthma. The Center has several objectives regarding of the epidemiological component of the Center : characterize and compare exposure to allergens and air pollutants among inner city children with and without asthma; characterize in home fluctuations in air pollution and allergen exposure; estimate the occurrence of respiratory death among inner city children with asthma; study environmental and hereditary factors involved in development of determinants of childhood asthma; assess independent and joint effects of exposure to indoor allergens and indoor air pollution on respiratory death in children with asthma; characterize current use of environmental control practices among inner city children with asthma; identify barriers for primary care providers caring for inner city children with asthma through the use of g environmental control practice guidelines; assess the differential impact of indoor and outdoor air pollution among asthmatic and non-asthmatic homes; and understand the relative contribution of different structural, financial and personal barriers to use of recommended environmental control practices for children with asthma. The Center's community interventions include studying how effective current environmental control methods are in reducing hazardous exposures and their ill effects on health. Mt. Sinai School of Medicine The Children's Health Center at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine focuses on neurodevelopmental deficits that come from exposures to pesticides in the home and from PCBs in the diet. The work is conducted in East Harlem. Members of community-based organizations and scientists will work together to test whether the practice of Integrated Pest Management, along with changes in eating and drinking habits, can reduce exposures in these children. Researchers will follow the growth and nervous system development of a group of children who are regularly exposed to household pesticides. Other work will follow up on adults who, 20 years before, had enrolled in a childhood growth and development study, which has stored their mothers' blood specimens. The study will look at levels of PCBs in the mothers' blood during gestation and compare these with health effects in the adult children. This Center also studies how environmental toxins affect development of the nervous and endocrine systems and how genetic differences affect susceptibility to these toxins. University of Michigan School of Public Health This Center has several projects related to asthma and treatment of asthma. The first two projects are titled Core 1: Community-Based Intervention to Reduce Environmental Triggers for Asthma among Children, and Core 2: Indoor and Outdoor Air Contaminant Exposures. These projects focus on individually assessing and tailoring intervention needs of each family including cleaning, stopping smoking, asthma education, and pest control. Additionally, an Asthma Resource Guide was developed and was distributed to Steering Committee members, library branches in Detroit, and organizations upon request. The Center is developing its community organizing component and is currently writing job descriptions, agreeing on a Memorandum of Understanding between all the involved partners, and recruiting and hiring staff, a process that includes both an interview and a "mock community meeting". Another study project focuses specifically on the role of chemokines, which are proteins released by the body in response to a biological insult or allergen, in the development of asthma. Studies have focused on the inflammatory mediators that cause asthma-like inflammation of the lungs. University of Iowa School of Medicine The theme of this Center is to investigate the causes and course of diseases of the airways in children from rural communities. The central idea behind this research program is that understanding diseases of the airways in rural children will help develop a wide range of preventive programs to reduce illness and death from asthma in rural children. The specific projects being studied are: Evaluating the role of a community-based, multi-component intervention approach in preventing and controlling childhood asthma. Addressing a fundamental issue in childhood asthma: why only a few children who wheeze at an early age will later develop persistent airway disease that continues throughout their life. Evaluating the proposal that exposure to grain dust leads to the release of biological components (macrophage-specific cytokines) and that this release is due, in some part, to bacterial components (bacterial lipopolysaccharides) associated with the grain dust. Examining the role of Respiratory Syncytial Virus infection, a common infection during the first year, in how the airway responds to endotoxins and inflammation caused by dust. University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine This Center is working to better understand how children and their environments interact and how that interaction can sometimes harm children's growth and development. The Center has focused on understanding how exposures to household and agricultural pesticides affect children's health. One study is looking at the basic mechanisms of how pesticides affect development. Another study is examining where, when, and how often pesticide exposures are occurring in children. A continuing focus of the Center is to use risk analysis techniques to better describe health risks. University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health This Center focuses on the environmental health risks of Latino farmers in Salinas Valley in Monterey County, California, a largely underserved group. CHAMACOS (Center for the Health Assessment of Mother and Children of Salinas) is a partnership between the community and the university that is investigating how pregnant women and children living in the Salinas Valley are exposed to pesticides and allergens. The Salinas Valley is an agricultural region that grows lettuce, broccoli, strawberries, artichokes, and many other vegetables. Pesticides are heavily used on these crops. The goal of CHAMACOS is to translate research findings on these exposures into practical and effective methods of reducing exposure to pesticides and other environmental contaminants and so reduce the incidence of environmentally-related childhood disease. Robert Wood Johnson Medical School The goal of this Center is to determine the influences of environmental exposure to neurotoxicants on child neurological health and development with special emphasis on autism and its related disabilities. The Center has five main projects, all designed to share with other the projects its experimental designs and results and, wherever possible, to add new information from each project into the study designs of the other projects. The Center's three Basic Sciences Projects study brain development and injury to the nervous system during early stages of development, from neurogenesis through morphogenesis (adhesion and repulsion), and how nervous system function affects behavioral development. Two projects involving clinical studies also are underway at the Center. One, the Clinical Sciences Project, will explore how environmental chemicals that may alter brain function affect the growth of individual regions of the brain, and possible new interactions between genes and the environment that relate to autism. One of the questions these studies will try to answer is if the regression of function, observed in some children when they learn to walk and crawl, is due to increased exposure to certain environmental neurotoxicants. The second clinical project, the Exposure Assessment and Intervention Project, will characterize the personal, residential, and general community exposure of children studied in the Clinical Sciences Project. In addition, researchers will determine the need for interventions to reduce neurotoxicant exposure among children with autism, and assess the impact of such interventions. Children's Hospital Medical Center and University of Cincinnati College of Medicine The theme of this Center is to study the effects of common toxic substances on the nervous system and behavior. The research projects in the Center will: identify and define causes of developmental disorders, behavioral problems, growth retardation, and hearing loss caused by environmental toxins; develop and test biomarkers for in utero exposure and methods to monitor how children are being exposed to toxins in the womb and to describe risks related to these exposures; use epidemiological methods to test the safety and effectiveness of interventions to reduce exposures to common environmental toxins; identify ill effects of exposures to lead and how it relates to social function, delinquent behavior and incarceration, conduct disorders, and features consistent with ADHD in early adulthood; identify ill effects of lead on how the brain functions, using state-of-the-art technology; and help community members to identify and, ultimately, protect children from ill effects linked with environmental toxins. University of California at Davis The main concern of this Center is to understand autism's common patterns of dysfunction and elucidate mechanisms by which known nervous and immune system toxins contribute to abnormal social behavior in children, and to develop good strategies to reduce and prevent autism. Three research projects will be undertaken at this Center: community-based research that will collect extensive information about environmental exposures, and collect tissue samples, from a total of 2,000 Californian children and their immediate families; studies in animals on how early exposure to compounds known to be toxic to the immune and nervous systems, at or just after the time of birth, affects normal development of social behavior (with or without immune challenge influences); and studies of specific areas of the brain that relate to important aspects of social behavior, and the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying abnormal development of these areas. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The overall goal of research at this Center is to study how exposure to PCBs and methylmercury affects nervous system development of children. PCBs and methylmercury occur together in the environment, and they may have additive or synergistic effects on nervous system function. The community-based project at the Center both studies the extent of exposure effects and develops methods to reduce and prevent exposures. The primary goal of the epidemiological studies is to assess how exposure to PCBs and methylmercury in contaminated fish affects women's reproductive health and the development of children. The primary goals of the prevention/intervention aspect of the community-based project are to educate Hmong and Lao families about the risks of eating contaminated fish, and to provides practical information about where it is safe and not safe to fish, which species of fish are safe to eat, and how to prepare fish for cooking so as to reduce exposure to contaminants. The Center also includes two basic biomedical research projects that relate to the community-based project. The first project will assess cognitive, sensory and motor function in rats exposed at or around birth to PCBs and methylmercury in different combinations. The other biomedical project will investigate specific ways that PCBs and methylmercury alter nervous system development and behavior.

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