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Identifying and Assessing Communities at Risk
Quick Finder
- Accountability - Assessing Risk Management Decisions
- Asthma Research
- Biological (Mechanistic) Research
- Biomarkers for Cumulative Risk
- Emerging Technologies
- Identifying and Assessing Communities at Risk
- Life Stages Research
- Longitudinal Research
- Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Modeling
- Risk Assessment for Chemical Mixtures
- Source-to-Effect Modeling
The Issue | Science Objectives | Research Highlights | Impact and Outcome
The Issue
In many cases, human health often is directly related to where one lives. Certain communities, groups, or individuals within a community may be more at risk than others from multiple exposures to chemicals based on the location of a town; the individual's location within a town; activities, such as commuting to work or school or exercising; dietary patterns of residents; or socioeconomic status. Focusing on the community provides a rational starting point for developing, evaluating, and applying cumulative risk tools to determine the risk of chemical mixtures.
Science Objectives
The goals of this research are to develop, evaluate, and apply tools for estimating exposures to multiple stressors that will lead to cumulative risks in a community. Research is specifically targeted toward understanding the key elements that lead to risk among groups of individuals and the community.
This research is designed to address a number of scientific questions, including determining exposures to pollutants and other nonchemical stressors that lead to cumulative risks in a community and assessing how to identify and prioritize communities at risk. Other work will focus on assessing whether exposures to pollutants and other nonchemical stressors are distributed equally across the community, the relative risk from different sources of pollutants within a community, and the most effective approaches for reducing risks within a community.
Research Goals:
- Provide the methods, models, and data that will allow risk assessors and risk managers to more accurately estimate risk from multiple stressors accumulated over time, and from pathways and routes within a community-level structure (e.g., both demographical and geographical)
- Develop methods and models that can be used in epidemiological research to provide better estimates within a community
- Provide data that can be used to develop and evaluate the impact or risk management mitigation strategies at the community level
Research Highlights
- The research is still in the planning stages. Areas where work has begun include exposure modeling for a study in New Haven, CT, development of estimates of exposure from dietary sources, and planning for exposure estimates for epidemiologic studies with multiple risk factors.
- In October 2007, a summary document (42 pp, 182KB, About PDF)was prepared from a research workshop on research needs for community based risk assessment.
More information on the workshop