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Research Needs Identified by the 2007 Workshop
Emerging Themes: Many research needs identified at the National Center for Environmental Research (NCER)/National Center for Computational Toxicology (NCCT) co-sponsored CBRA Workshop fall under a specific topic. We have characterized these topics as “emerging themes” that need to be addressed within the field of CBRA.
- A public health infrastructure that can amend current gaps in data and encourage cross-disciplinary teams to develop new models and methods
- Methods to include the community in the research process (community-based participatory research frameworks)
- A new conceptual model for risk assessment
- Statistical techniques to better evaluate health outcomes at the community-level
Research Needs: The research needs identified at the CBRA Workshop are listed in the table below:
- Session I: Data Needs and Measurement Methods for CBRA
- Session II: The Biological Impact of Non-Chemical Stressors and Interaction with Other Environmental Exposures
- Session III: Statistical and Mathematical Modeling for CBRA
- Cross-Cutting Suggestions to Enhance CBRA
Session I: Data Needs and Measurement Methods for CBRA
| 1. Develop metrics, indicators, and biomarkers for exposure and health tracking surveillance |
| 2. Develop simple, low-cost monitoring methods for pollutants and pathogens at the individual and community level over space and through time (including real-time) |
| 3. Develop simple, low-cost monitoring methods for nonchemical stressors at the individual and community level over space and through time (including real-time) |
| 4. Develop enhanced sensor technologies to provide real-time data on individual and community level measures of exposure to environmental stressors |
| 5. Create accessible, well documented databases with links to full range of exposure information, to include an infrastructure to facilitate addition of data by investigators and the sharing of data and tools used to characterize environmental stressors |
| 6. Identify and adapt indices currently used in social sciences to measure community-level psychosocial health |
| 7. Translate more qualitative social indices into a form that is useful for quantitative risk assessments |
Session II: The Biological Impact of Non-Chemical Stressors and Interaction with Other Environmental Exposures
| 8. Review social variables of importance for health in the context of EPA risk assessment |
| 9. Develop approaches for incorporating vulnerability into risk assessment models |
| 10. Develop techniques to incorporate important social variables as modeling parameters |
| 11. Develop techniques to use community characteristics as proxies of psychosocial exposure |
| 12. Understand the interaction (chemical dose/response relationships) of chemical and nonchemical stressors, specifically psychosocial stress |
| 13. Obtain data on baseline variability of psychosocial stress hormones among the population in order to understand inter- and intra-individual variability |
| 14. Develop tools to monitor psychosocial stress levels in real-time (develop biomarkers) at individual and community level |
| 15. Incorporate psychosocial stress into physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) and physiologically based pharmacodynamic (PBPD) models |
| 16. Examine differential activity patterns between social groups |
Session III: Statistical and Mathematical Modeling for CBRA
| 17. Compare various monitoring and modeling techniques to assess value and ease of use |
| 18. Develop techniques to integrate existing datasets on population health for future predictions/modeling |
| 19. Develop and apply advanced statistical techniques to: characterize group-level effects, synthesize information from multiple datasets, extrapolate data across communities, reduce limitations of small population studies, account for possible underestimation of exposure, etc. |
| 20. Increase the ability of Hierarchical Bayesian Model to add data from multiple sources and scales |
| 21. Develop spatiotemporal models that can adjust for information at multiple scales and levels of accuracy (temporal, spatial, or data from multiple sources) |
| 22. Develop better geospatial techniques to characterize communities |
| 23. Explore emerging geospatial tools (e.g. Google Earth) |
| 24. Develop hierarchical datasets gathered at multiple levels that can be mapped collected, organized and accessed by community members |
| 25. Improve methods for interpreting biomonitoring data |
| 26. Develop transparent modeling methods that can be collaboratively used with the community |
| 27. Better communicate methods and results of complex models |
Cross-Cutting Suggestions to Enhance CBRA
| 28. Develop a new framework to integrate all chemical, non-chemical, and vulnerability issues into risk assessment |
| 29. Establish attributes of successful and unsuccessful case studies (deliberative processes where communities partner with EPA). |
| 30. Integrate community knowledge for risk assessment |
| 31. Develop tools/methods to elicit community knowledge for risk assessment |
| 32. Establish models, tools, and frameworks from other disciplines (specifically the ecological sciences) that would be useful for human health risk assessment |
| 33. Create access to databases that give information at the local level |
| 34. Integrate multidisciplinary teams to undertake CBRA research |
| 35. Integrate multi-agency (Federal, State, Local) partnerships to address CBRA |
| 36. Utilize community training modules on basic environmental health and risk assessment |
| 37. Focus on research that is directly usable by community or its local health or environmental department (community-driven research) |
| 38. Establish training modules in academia/agencies on how to conduct community-based participatory research |