Climate and Chronic Disease
Hello all.
We are a team, and we care about climates and diseases.
About the project
As a team of biostatistians and epidemiologists in training, we care about the impact of climate on diseases and understand the power of visualization and data analysis to help make sense of nuanced interactions. Our project set out to investigate how environmental exposures like air quality and UV radiation are associated with incidence rates of chronic health conditions like lung cancer, melanoma skin cancer, and asthma. We know that air pollution has been linked to chronic respiratory conditions while sun exposure is a notable leading risk factor for skin cancer. However, we sought to understand to what degree can we visualize these relationships and analyze them via statistical models.
Using environmental measures of fine particulate matter and ozone as proxies for air pollution and UV radiation as a measure for sun exposure, we compared these climatic exposures to disease incidence data specifically for our outcomes of interest. To limit the scope and scale of our study we focused on three states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Overview of Our Website
On our site you’ll find:
- Our full Final Report detailing our project from start to finish
- A look at variations in climate indicators for air quality and UV exposure under our Climate Data
- Spatial and temporal trends in lung cancer, melanoma skin cancer, and asthma under Health Outcomes Data
- A Data Exploration Map offering an interactive way to see both climate and health changes over time in our region of interest
- Detailed Regression analyses at the state and county level to assess potential associations between the environmental exposures and health outcomes