BACKGROUND There is very little genetically informative research identifying true environmental risks for psychiatric conditions. These may be best explored in regions with diverse environmental exposures. The current study aimed to explore similarities and differences in such risks contributing to depression and fatigue. METHODS Home interviews assessed depression (lifetime-ever), fatigue an...

The Workshop on Environmental Exposures and Cancer was held by Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) 25-26 April 2001. An expert panel convened to achieve consensus on a list of important environmental exposures, priority environmental exposures in Ontario, and recommendations for CCO in the areas of surveillance, research, and prevention activities to address these environmental exposures. Panel members d...

Rising multiple sclerosis incidence over the last 50 years and geographic patterns of occurrence suggest an environmental role in the causation of this multifactorial disease. Design options for epidemiological studies of environmental causes of multiple sclerosis are limited by the low incidence of the disease, possible diagnostic delay and budgetary constraints. We describe scientific and met...

There is growing interest in disentangling the health effects of spatially clustered social and physical environmental exposures and in exploring potential synergies among them, with particular attention directed to the combined effects of psychosocial stress and air pollution. Both exposures may be elevated in lower-income urban communities, and it has been hypothesized that stress, which can ...

With emerging evidence indicating that independent of physical activity, sedentary behaviour (SB) can be detrimental to health, researchers are increasingly aiming to understand the influence of multiple contexts such as urban design and built environment on SB. However, weather variation, a factor that continuously interacts with all other environmental variables, has been consistently underex...

We examined the behavior of alternative smoothing methods for modeling environmental epidemiology data. Model fit can only be examined when the true exposure-response curve is known and so we used simulation studies to examine the performance of penalized splines (P-splines), restricted cubic splines (RCS), natural splines (NS), and fractional polynomials (FP). Survival data were generated unde...

Research interest in the influence of environmental factors on nutrition and physical activity behaviors has surged internationally in recent years. This is evident from a rapidly expanding literature and facilitated by advances in methodological and analytical approaches to assessing multiple levels of influence on health behaviors. However, a number of conceptual challenges complicate researc...

BACKGROUND A study was undertaken to examine temporal trends and ethnic differences in the asthma mortality rate in Singapore. METHODS Asthma mortality rates in Singapore were estimated from vital data for the years from 1976 to 1995. Trends in sex and age specific (5-14, 15-34, 35-59, 60+ years) rates were obtained for four periods (1976-80, 1981-85, 1986-90, 1991-95) and for Chinese, Malay,...

Prolonged use of computers during daily work activities and recreation is often cited as a cause of neck pain. This review of the literature identifies public health aspects of neck pain as associated with computer use. While some retrospective studies support the hypothesis that frequent computer operation is associated with neck pain, few prospective studies reveal causal relationships. Many ...

The final meeting of the EXPOsOMICS project "Final Policy Workshop and Stakeholder Consultation" took place 28-29 March 2017 to present the main results of the project and discuss their implications both for future research and for regulatory and policy activities. This paper summarizes presentations and discussions at the meeting related with the main results and advances in exposome research ...