Perry, Lee Lecturers Aim for Meaningful Results from Complex Factors, Data

Our exposure to the environment is made up of more than the air we breathe. Add noise, light, natural vegetation, water and more, and you’ve got the “exposome”—the factors around us that can affect our health.

Teasing out which among the multiplicity of factors in the exposome are meaningful for health and how they work together is the purview of environmental epidemiology expert Francine Laden, ScD, MS, who presented this year’s Richard V. Lee, MD Lecture in Global Health. It’s a complex topic, further complicated by other factors that Laden, professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and her team examine such as geography or social networks.

“When I’m talking about the exposome, I’m really thinking about how everything that we experience, externally and internally, emotionally, and through connectiveness. All interact together to influence our health,” Laden said.

During her talk, Laden described her work drawing on data from long-running research still conducted at Harvard: The Nurses’ Health Study; The Nurses’ Health Study II; the Health Professionals Follow-up Study; and the Growing Up Today Study 1 (GUTS 1) and GUTS 2.

These studies have different participants and examine different health risks and outcomes. However, all collect residential information, which meant Laden could use residential addresses to create a map of the distribution of each study’s participants across the United States. Her team then examined questions about things like whether a neighborhood is walkable or near greenspace, and mapped environmental exposures like air pollution.

Laden is also interested in noise exposure or noise pollution. Although people’s experience of noise is subjective, research found exposure to noise is associated with immediate concerns, such as sleep disturbance, and chronic health issues.

Not all exposures are associated with negative health effects. Exposure to green space, for example, seems to be associated with better health. Although researchers, Laden included, are still exploring how time in nature leads to better well-being, “… green space makes you happier and improves your mental health,” she said.

The Office of Global Health Initiatives holds the Richard V. Lee, MD Lectureship in Global Health annually to celebrate the life and work of former UB faculty member Richard Lee, who engaged in research and service around the world and in Buffalo.

Data can be a bonanza for researchers seeking understanding from it—as long as the studies examining data are well designed, according to Kiros Berhane, PhD, chair of the Biostatistics Department at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He visited UB as the 2024 J. Warren Perry lecturer, discussing some of the impacts biostatistics has had in children’s health and climate change.

Berhane has played a major role in the ongoing Southern California Children’s Health Study, a large-scale look into how air pollution has affected those in the area where he lives.

The Southern California study has observed roughly 11,700 children throughout multiple neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area. Researchers identified 12 different pollution profiles and measured lung function and many other variables, Berhane said. These measurements, he continued, were compared to determine if growing up in polluted areas had any true effects on children compared to those living in relatively cleaner neighborhoods.

Regarding the study design’s impact on results, Berhane noted the outcome may not have been as intuitive as first glance may suggest.

“You can live in a very clean community, but if you live in a house next to a school bus barn and every day you’re breathing diesel fumes, living in a clean community doesn't help,” he said. “So, you have to be able to identify where the effect is coming from, and you need to have the right study design.”

Berhane’s work as a biostatistician has allowed him to step in and model better, more functioning studies, he said. That’s been his role with teams he’s worked on, including a National Institutes of Health P20 study, “Climate and Health: Action and Research for Transformational Change (CHART).”

The group, which consists of many disciplines but includes several biostatisticians, has taken a multisectoral approach to try and address how research approaches the massive global health problem of climate change and how it’s being studied, he said.