Lessons learned and recommendations in conducting solutions-driven environmental and public health research.

Solutions-driven research is a transdisciplinary approach that incorporates diverse forms of expertise to identify solutions to stakeholder-identified environmental problems. This qualitative evaluation of early solutions-driven research projects provides transferable recommendations to improve researcher and stakeholder experiences and outcomes in transdisciplinary environmental research projects. Researchers with the U.

Exploration of PM mass, source, and component-related factors that might explain heterogeneity in daily PM-mortality associations across the United States.

Multi-city epidemiologic studies examining short-term (daily) differences in fine particulate matter (PM) provide evidence of substantial spatial heterogeneity in city-specific mortality risk estimates across the United States. Because PM is a mixture of particles, both directly emitted from sources or formed through atmospheric reactions, some of this heterogeneity may be due to regional variations in PM toxicity. Using inverse variance weighted linear regression, we examined change in percent change in mortality in association with 24 "exposure" determinants representing three basic groupings based on potential explanations for differences in PM toxicity - size, source, and composition.

A value of information framework for assessing the trade-offs associated with uncertainty, duration, and cost of chemical toxicity testing.

A number of investigators have explored the use of value of information (VOI) analysis to evaluate alternative information collection procedures in diverse decision-making contexts. This paper presents an analytic framework for determining the value of toxicity information used in risk-based decision making. The framework is specifically designed to explore the trade-offs between cost, timeliness, and uncertainty reduction associated with different toxicity-testing methodologies.

A Framework that Considers the Impacts of Time, Cost, and Uncertainty in the Determination of the Cost Effectiveness of Toxicity-Testing Methodologies.

Regulatory agencies are required to evaluate the impacts of thousands of chemicals. Toxicological tests currently used in such evaluations are time-consuming and resource intensive; however, advances in toxicology and related fields are providing new testing methodologies that reduce the cost and time required for testing. The selection of a preferred methodology is challenging because the new methodologies vary in duration and cost, and the data they generate vary in the level of uncertainty.

Leveraging risk communication science across US federal agencies.

Many US federal agencies apply principles from risk communication science across a wide variety of hazards. In so doing, they identify key research and practice gaps that, if addressed, could help better serve the nation’s communities and greatly enhance practice, research, and policy development.

Scaling Up: Citizen Science Engagement and Impacts Beyond the Individual.

As the application of citizen science expands to address increasingly complex social problems (e.g., community health), there is opportunity to consider higher-order engagement beyond that of individual members of a community.

Estimating Lifetime Cost of Illness. An Application to Asthma.

Approximately 8% of the U.S. population suffers from asthma, a chronic condition.

Knowing Your Audience: A Typology of Smoke Sense Participants to Inform Wildfire Smoke Health Risk Communication.

Central to public health risk communication is understanding the perspectives and shared values among individuals who need the information. Using the responses from a Smoke Sense citizen science project, we examined perspectives on the issue of wildfire smoke as a health risk in relation to an individual's preparedness to adopt recommended health behaviors. The Smoke Sense smartphone application provides wildfire-related health risk resources and invites participants to record their perspectives on the issue of wildfire smoke.

Institutional insights on integrating social and environmental science for solutions-driven research.

Solving complex environmental problems requires interdisciplinary research involving the social and environmental sciences. The U.S.

Illuminating Stakeholder Perspectives at the Intersection of Air Quality Health Risk Communication and Cardiac Rehabilitation.

There is ample evidence of adverse cardiovascular health outcomes associated with exposure to air pollution and cardiac rehabilitation patients are at increased risk for future adverse health events related to air quality. Risk communication and health messaging about recommended behaviors to reduce exposure to air pollution can be integrated into existing care routines and structures. How this can be achieved most appropriately and effectively is not well understood.

Global estimates of mortality associated with long-term exposure to outdoor fine particulate matter.

Exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM) is a major global health concern. Quantitative estimates of attributable mortality are based on disease-specific hazard ratio models that incorporate risk information from multiple PM sources (outdoor and indoor air pollution from use of solid fuels and secondhand and active smoking), requiring assumptions about equivalent exposure and toxicity. We relax these contentious assumptions by constructing a PM-mortality hazard ratio function based only on cohort studies of outdoor air pollution that covers the global exposure range.

The Environmental Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program - Community Edition (BenMAP-CE): A tool to estimate the health and economic benefits of reducing air pollution.

A number of software tools exist to estimate the health and economic impacts associated with air quality changes. Over the past 15 years, the U.S.

Understanding social and behavioral drivers and impacts of air quality sensor use.

Background: Lower-cost air quality sensors (hundreds to thousands of dollars) are now available to individuals and communities. This technology is undergoing a rapid and fragmented evolution, resulting in sensors that have uncertain data quality, measure different air pollutants and possess a variety of design attributes. Why and how individuals and communities choose to use sensors is arguably influenced by social context.

Estimates and 25-year trends of the global burden of disease attributable to ambient air pollution: an analysis of data from the Global Burden of Diseases Study 2015.

Background: Exposure to ambient air pollution increases morbidity and mortality, and is a leading contributor to global disease burden. We explored spatial and temporal trends in mortality and burden of disease attributable to ambient air pollution from 1990 to 2015 at global, regional, and country levels.

Methods: We estimated global population-weighted mean concentrations of particle mass with aerodynamic diameter less than 2·5 μm (PM) and ozone at an approximate 11 km × 11 km resolution with satellite-based estimates, chemical transport models, and ground-level measurements.

A class of non-linear exposure-response models suitable for health impact assessment applicable to large cohort studies of ambient air pollution.

The effectiveness of regulatory actions designed to improve air quality is often assessed by predicting changes in public health resulting from their implementation. Risk of premature mortality from long-term exposure to ambient air pollution is the single most important contributor to such assessments and is estimated from observational studies generally assuming a log-linear, no-threshold association between ambient concentrations and death. There has been only limited assessment of this assumption in part because of a lack of methods to estimate the shape of the exposure-response function in very large study populations.

The impact of weather changes on air quality and health in the United States in 1994-2012.

Air quality is heavily influenced by weather conditions. In this study, we assessed the impact of long-term weather changes on air quality and health in the US during 1994-2012. We quantified past weather-related increases, or 'weather penalty', in ozone (O) and fine particulate matter (PM), and thereafter estimated the associated excess deaths.

Assessing Temporal and Spatial Patterns of Observed and Predicted Ozone in Multiple Urban Areas.

Background: Ambient monitoring data show spatial gradients in ozone (O3) across urban areas. Nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions reductions will likely alter these gradients. Epidemiological studies often use exposure surrogates that may not fully account for the impacts of spatially and temporally changing concentrations on population exposure.

Climate change impacts on projections of excess mortality at 2030 using spatially varying ozone-temperature risk surfaces.

We project the change in ozone-related mortality burden attributable to changes in climate between a historical (1995-2005) and near-future (2025-2035) time period while incorporating a non-linear and synergistic effect of ozone and temperature on mortality. We simulate air quality from climate projections varying only biogenic emissions and holding anthropogenic emissions constant, thus attributing changes in ozone only to changes in climate and independent of changes in air pollutant emissions. We estimate non-linear, spatially varying, ozone-temperature risk surfaces for 94 US urban areas using observed data.

A New Method to Jointly Estimate the Mortality Risk of Long-Term Exposure to Fine Particulate Matter and its Components.

Most studies on the association between exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and mortality have considered only total concentration of PM2.5 or individual components of PM2.

Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks in 188 countries, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013.

Background: The Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factor study 2013 (GBD 2013) is the first of a series of annual updates of the GBD. Risk factor quantification, particularly of modifiable risk factors, can help to identify emerging threats to population health and opportunities for prevention. The GBD 2013 provides a timely opportunity to update the comparative risk assessment with new data for exposure, relative risks, and evidence on the appropriate counterfactual risk distribution.

Analysis of alternative pathways for reducing nitrogen oxide emissions.

Unlabelled: Strategies for reducing tropospheric ozone (O3) typically include modifying combustion processes to reduce the formation of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and applying control devices that remove NOx from the exhaust gases of power plants, industrial sources and vehicles. For portions of the U.S.

Meta-Analysis Methods to Estimate the Shape and Uncertainty in the Association Between Long-Term Exposure to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter and Cause-Specific Mortality Over the Global Concentration Range.

Estimates of excess mortality associated with exposure to ambient concentrations of fine particulate matter have been obtained from either a single cohort study or pooling information from a small number of studies. However, standard frequentist methods of pooling are known to underestimate statistical uncertainty in the true risk distribution when the number of studies pooled is small. Alternatively, Bayesian pooling methods using noninformative priors yield unrealistically large amounts of uncertainty in this case.

Counterpoint: moving from potential-outcomes thinking to doing--changing research planning to enable successful health outcomes research.

The potential-outcomes framework is an appealing new approach that imposes a degree of formal conceptual modeling beyond traditional epidemiologic methods for assessing associations between air pollution and health. However, it introduces a number of additional factors to consider when selecting intervention and especially control conditions that call for forward-thinking research designs. We propose that researchers seeking to implement the potential-outcomes framework consider the use of prospective designs that provide more opportunities to establish well-defined intervention and control populations and determine causal relationships between air quality and health.