Grants and Fellowships | 2014

25 Childhood and Adolescent Environmental Exposures, Measures of Health Status at Age 17 and the Incidence of Cancer in Adulthood We have developed an epidemiologic resource for assessing associations of environmental exposures in adolescence with multifaceted health outcomes that will focus initially on relating traffic air pollution exposure to measures of health status in adolescence and to subsequent cancer incidence and cause-specific mortality during young and mid adulthood. Israelis undergo a compulsory health examination at the age of 17 prior to military service. We have linked ~2,600,000 males and females examined from 1967 to 2012 to the national cancer register to ascertain incident cancer diagnoses (n=63,000) and to the national death registry to ascertain cause-specific mortality outcomes (n=44,000) during follow-up periods extending up to 40+ years. We are geocoding the residential addresses at age 17 (i.e.. x,y geographic coordinates) in order to enable estimation of individual environmental exposures as well as census tract-based characteristics such as socioeconomic position. A Geographic Information Systems-based (GIS-based) reconstruction of the road system, built-up areas, population densities, traffic volumes and open spaces in Israel was undertaken for each decade going back from the present to the 1960s. These data served as the inputs for the development of NO x -based land use regression models to predict monitoring station measures of traffic-related pollution exposure for the recent period (1990-2010). The models that were extrapolated back to the 1960s are being validated against independent estimates by the Central Bureau of Statistics of traffic-based pollution. The models are to be expanded to include PM 2.5 exposures. The main outcomes to be assessed are measures of health status at age 17 (as determined at the recruitment center health examinations) and subsequent incident site-specific cancer and cause-specific mortality. The study should soon enter the data analysis phase. The reconstructed exposure estimates can, in the future, be further developed to accommodate additional environmental hazards such as electromagnetic fields produced by electric power lines and agricultural exposures to which the geocoded addresses can be linked. Jeremy D. Kark 1 Joel Schwartz 2 Noam Levin 3 | Hagai Levine 1 Ilan Levy 4 Lital Keinan-Boker 5 1. Hebrew University – Hadassah 2. Harvard University, USA 3. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 4. Israel Ministry of Environmental Protection 5. Israel Center for Disease Control (ICDC) 2010- Multi-Year Research Grants