Environmental exposures, socio-economic (SE) and behavioral variables all contribute to morbidity and mortality in the United States and in other developed nations. As part of our ongoing studies on pollution and health, we have created the Hopkins Integrated National Tools (HINT) comprising national data bases on health, pollution, weather, and socio-economic and behavioral variables for the entire population of US elderly. HINT provides the unique opportunity for investigating important questions in social and behavioral research (Aim 1) and for enhancing the methodological and substantive contributions of our ongoing studies on pollution and health (Aim 2).
The specific aims of this proposal are to develop and apply multilevel statistical models for: 1) determining SE and behavioral factors that influence health when these variables are collected at different levels of spatial aggregation (Aim 1); and 2) for jointly estimating short and long term effects of air pollution on disease outcomes by taking into account cross-level interactions between air pollution exposure, SE and behavioral variables. The work will contribute to establishing an integrated statistical approach for social and environmental epidemiology and therefore will enhance the research goals of the parent grant (Statistical Methods for Environmental Epidemiology R01 ES012054-01). We anticipate that findings of these studies will impact air quality regulations and will better inform public policy. Our analytical framework, which will include development of multilevel models and of computationally fast algorithms for their implementation, will find application in a broad array of policy studies. ? ?
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