While a growing number of studies corroborate that heat is associated with pediatric health impacts, this area of heat and child health remains critically understudied, thereby limiting public health prevention and clinical approaches focused on heat health risk reduction for children. Drawing on our preliminary work, we hypothesize that 1) child vulnerability to the health effects of heat varies by demographics and community-level exposures in ways that have important public health consequences; that 2) the greatest health impact to children from heat is among non-heat specific diagnoses; and that 3) outcomes such as injury and violence represent an important gap in existing research that is potentially missing the bulk of heat-associated health burden for children. We propose an investigation that builds on a parent R01 using an administrative dataset that is large enough to permit examination of subgroups to identify vulnerable subpopulations and employing a unique previously- compiled dataset of city-wide susceptibility indicators. We propose to examine community-level exposures that will shed light on underlying etiology of the observed heat-injury/violence associations. Specifically, this supplemental diversity promotion proposal aims to 1) Examine heat and violence associations among the NYC pediatric population and 2) refine our understanding of the influence of the demographics and community-level exposures on heat-violence associations for children. Results of this research will be disseminated as part of the training and outreach series proposed in the parent grant aim 4.
The proposed research in this Research Supplement to Promote Diversity for parent grant (ES030717) aims to overcome gaps in child health and heat research in regards to injury and violence by combining temporally resolved estimates of surface temperature with large statewide administrative clinical datasets. Further, social and demographics effect modifiers will be considered in order to identify key subpopulations and modifiable risk factors across a diverse urban landscape. The design will be tailored to work in concert with existing heat action plans used by municipal level health agencies such that those plans can most easily accommodate updated findings.
