Early Morning Traning Sessions

Wednesday 26^th July 7:30 – 8:30:

Miguel Hernán: Weighting: another way to adjust for confounding.

Stratification, regression, and matching are commonly use methods to adjust for measured confounding in epidemiologic studies. Unfortunately all the above methods can introduce bias when trying to estimate the causal effect of time-varying exposures. This session will present a conceptual introduction to inverse probability weighting, a method that may appropriately adjust for confounding for the effect of time-varying exposures.

Joel Kaufman: Cardiovascular effects of air pollution: chronic and acute effects

Epidemiological research on health effects of air pollution has increasingly focused on cardiovascular effects.  Some studies focus on short-term effects, while other focus on effects of long-term exposures.  This session will provide an opportunity to discuss the different approaches used in these studies depending on the time-scale of interest, and the different cardiovascular health outcomes assessed in various approaches.

Thursday 27^th July 7:30 – 8:30:

Jordi Sunyer: Neurodevelopment as a critical endpoint of environmental agents

Environmental exposures in utero and during early life may permanently change the body’s structure, physiology, and metabolism and lead to diseases in adult life. The central nervous system (CNS) has unprotected barriers and a broad time window of conformation, thus leading to a long period of vulnerability in the developmental process and to susceptibility to any environmental insult. Maturation of the cortex (i.e., synaptic changes and axonal myelinization) during the first years of life is very intensive, and the frontal cortex is the last one to mature (after adolescence). This period of life is considered an important window for brain development, since the brain’s plasticity decreases with age. Research conducted among a limited series of persistent pollutants (lead, mercury, arsenic, polychlorinated byphenils, DDT) and air pollutants shows that early-life exposure to chemicals at current environmental levels can be neurotoxic years or even decades after exposure. Exampes of gene-environmental findings are going to be repesented.

Annette Peters: Air pollution a risk factor for diabetes?

Systemic responses to ambient particulate matter have been indentified as a key mechanism for cardiovascular disease. Damage to other organs and an impact on metabolic diseases has been hypothesised. First evidence on ambient particulate matter as a factor for exacerbating diabetes has been documented.

Friday 28^th July 7:30 – 8:30:

Mike Brauer: Children's Health and the Built Environment

This presentation will examine the built environment and children's health, suggesting that people think holistically about the built environment rather than the more typical reductionist approach that focuses on single exposures in isolation.

Klea Katsouyani and Antonis Analitis: Analysis of epidemiological time series for aggregated data

We often use time series data to investigate the short-term effects of an environmental exposure (e.g. air pollution concentration, ambient temperature) on a health outcome (e.g. the daily number of deaths or the daily number of respiratory admissions for children in a specific population). This specific design has advantages, such as the availability of routinely collected data and the high statistical power for detecting small effects, but on the other hand it presents difficulties in the analysis, for example effectively adjusting for biases which may result from seasonal patterns, or for the autocorrelation in the residuals. The issues around the analysis of aggregated time series data have attracted attention in recent years. Within this training session, the most important issues will be introduced and presented using specific examples and computer printouts from real data analysis whilst illustrating the various alternative approaches.