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The proposed Center seeks to identify and prevent risks from environment-susceptibility interactions that are contributing to the disproportionately heavy burden of asthma and developmental deficits in young African-American and Latino children from Harlem and Washington Heights. The Center brings together leading experts in molecular epidemiology, monitoring, ethnography, multiscale modeling, pulmonary medicine, child development, and community outreach. The purpose is to carry out comprehensive community-based etiologic and intervention studies of asthma and developmental impairment in a cohort of infants followed from pre-delivery through the first several years of life.
The goals are:
- to assess the role of specific pollutants and allergens in the indoor and outdoor environment-acting in conjunction with susceptibility due to psychosocial stress associated with living in a degraded environment and nutritional deficits associated with poverty--in developmental impairment and asthma in the infants; and
- to carry out an intervention in a subset of the same cohort, involving a combination of home clean-up, antioxidant supplementation, education and behavior modification (avoidance of tobacco smoking and toxic chemical exposures).
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