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Environmental Public Health Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Environmental Public Health

Interplay Of Environmental Pollutants And Folate In The Etiology Of Autistic Traits Analysis Using Multipollutant Approaches, Michael T. Mascari Sep 2022

Interplay Of Environmental Pollutants And Folate In The Etiology Of Autistic Traits Analysis Using Multipollutant Approaches, Michael T. Mascari

Doctoral Dissertations

Background: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a spectrum of communication deficits and repetitive behaviors. The challenges in learning, thinking, and problem-solving abilities of people with ASD can be debilitating. There is currently no cure for ASD. Many environmental pollutants are suspected to contribute to the etiology of ASD and its associated traits, whereas folate and folate supplements have been shown to exhibit both protective and adjuvant roles. Little is known about the interplay of multiple environmental pollutants and folate in the etiology of ASD. Additionally, statistical approaches that consider the effects of pollutant mixtures instead …


High-Dimensional Feature Selection And Multi-Level Causal Mediation Analysis With Applications To Human Aging And Cluster-Based Intervention Studies, Hachem Saddiki Oct 2021

High-Dimensional Feature Selection And Multi-Level Causal Mediation Analysis With Applications To Human Aging And Cluster-Based Intervention Studies, Hachem Saddiki

Doctoral Dissertations

Many questions in public health and medicine are fundamentally causal in that our objective is to learn the effect of some exposure, randomized or not, on an outcome of interest. As a result, causal inference frameworks and methodologies have gained interest as a promising tool to reliably answer scientific questions. However, the tasks of identifying and efficiently estimating causal effects from observed data still pose significant challenges under complex data generating scenarios. We focus on (1) high-dimensional settings where the number of variables is orders of magnitude higher than the number of observations; and (2) multi-level settings, where study participants …


Phthalates, Embryo Development, And Sperm Dna Methylation, Haotian Wu Jul 2018

Phthalates, Embryo Development, And Sperm Dna Methylation, Haotian Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

Infertility affects 15% of all couples and presents a major public health issue. Animal and human data indicate that epigenetic dysregulation in sperm is associated with poor male reproductive health and extensive epigenetic reprogramming during spermatogenesis presents a window of vulnerability for environmentally-induced epigenetic dysregulation. Phthalates is a class of ubiquitous environmental contaminant and global health concern. Phthalate exposure in humans has been associated with diminished male fertility, adverse birth outcomes, and altered offspring development. In order to facilitate additional research on this topic, we aimed to developing a higher throughput method of sperm nucleic acid extraction. In addition, this …