Time-Space Modeling of the Health Effects of Environment

Dear Colleagues,

Spatiotemporal mismatch in the resolution/scale and misalignment of environment and health data sets has been a major challenge for conducting epidemiological analyses of the health effects of environment. Because resolving spatiotemporal misalignment and resolution of these data sets often result in “exposure uncertainty” and/or “exposure misclassification”, failing to account for such exposure uncertainty and misclassification can result in biased (health) risk estimates. Therefore, addressing environmental exposure uncertainty and misclassification to quantify environmental disease burden is critically important for guiding policies to protect public health from environmental insults. This Special Issue invites scholarly work to address methodological, as well as application areas of spatiotemporal modeling of the health effects of environmental exposure or novel approaches for capturing and quantifying precise exposure. Example methodological and application focus areas of the issues are below:

Methodology

• Efficacy of different methods to quantify time-space varying and/or spatiotemporal lagged exposures of any of the environmental conditions,
• Methodology for estimating uncertainty in exposure assessment and/or exposure misclassification,
• Methodology for estimating health risk uncertainty with respect to exposure uncertainty,
• Methods of resolving spatiotemporal scales of environmental data to match with the spatiotemporal scales of health data sets,
• Methods of improving health risk estimates adjusting for exposure uncertainty and/or errors and/or misclassification.

Applications

• Quantitative analysis of any health outcome(s) with respect to spatiotemporal exposure to any environmental conditions using at least two different methods/approaches of exposure assessment,
• Comparison of the risk assessment using personal versus population exposure, i.e. comparison of aggregated versus disaggregated environment and health data sets, and
• Health effects of hieratical spatiotemporal environmental exposure, e.g., hospital admission due to COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) due to daily lagged air pollution exposure and seasonal meteorological conditions, and
• Application of portable and/or mobile sensor to compute precise air pollution exposure and its associated health effects.

Dr. Naresh Kumar
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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