Published Studies
Data Infrastructure
Recommendation: EPA must invest in systems to support collecting, organizing and making accessible environmental and health data that allow the Agency and the public to understand, monitor and act on environmental factors that influence health, resulting in more equitable public health safeguards.
Environmental Justice
Recommendation: We must adopt environmental justice principles in chemical policymaking and implement environmental statutes as Congress intended to fundamentally transform chemical policy to address health disparities from harmful chemicals.
Conflicts of Interest
Recommendation: To reduce biased findings, financial conflicts of interest from industry funding in environmental health research as well as industry ties on EPA advisory committees should be eliminated to the extent possible.
Systematic Review
RECOMMENDATION: To ensure EPA is making decisions based on the best available science, EPA must implement a science-based, validated systematic review method to inform policy and decision-making to save lives and money.
Chemical Policy
Recommendation: EPA must use the most scientifically up-to-date approaches to evaluate the hazards and risks of industrial chemicals and environmental pollutants that inform decision-making to protect public health.
Telomere length in early life predicts later length, and shortened telomere length among adults and children has been linked to increased risk of chronic disease and mortality. Maternal stress during pregnancy may impact telomere length of the newborn.
Systematic reviews are increasingly prevalent in environmental health due to their ability to synthesize evidence while reducing bias.
Women can be exposed to a multitude of hardships before and during pregnancy that may affect fetal growth, but previous approaches have not analyzed them jointly as social exposure mixtures.
Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are used in consumer products for their water repellent and flame retardant properties, respectively. However, there is widespread prenatal exposure and concern about their potential harm to the developing fetus.
This chapter provides basic definitions and methods used to synthesize epidemiological studies of air pollution effects in systematic reviews and metaanalyses and describes the use of systematic reviews and metaanalyses in policy- and decision-making and burden of disease/health impact assessments.
Human cytochrome p450 (CYP) enzyme expression and activity is lower in the fetus as compared to the adult; however, limited quantitative data exists regarding the specific differences in magnitude or the degree of inducibility due to environmental factors.
Prenatal polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) exposures are a public health concern due to their persistence and potential for reproductive and developmental harm.
Pregnant women who experience psychosocial stressors, such as stressful life events, poor neighborhood quality, and financial hardship, are at an increased risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes. Yet, few studies have examined associations between multiple stressors from different sources, which may be helpful to better inform causal pathways leading to adverse birth outcomes.
Recent studies report an association between preterm birth and exposure to unconventional oil and gas wells. There has been limited previous study on exposure to conventional wells, which are common in California. Our objective was to determine whether exposure to well sites was associated with increased odds of spontaneous preterm birth.