Decoding Mental Health Center
Population Health

Research to Understand How Environments and Communities Impact Mental Health

The environments and communities in which we live greatly impact our mental health. Our population health research aims to understand those factors and how they affect brain function, emotions and thoughts.

To achieve this, we harness and analyze data about “geomarkers” or place-based factors that we know affect mental health. We curate and maintain a geomarker library multiple researchers are using to identify prevention and mitigation strategies for specific risk factors, such as air pollution, greenspace and community poverty.

Nearly half of mental illnesses begin in childhood, with half of these conditions continuing into the adult years. It’s our goal to develop tools that allow us to identify trajectories of mental health early enough in a person’s life so that we can alter their trajectory and prevent mental illness. Geomarkers early in the life course represent chemical and non-chemical stressors that play synergistic roles in the development of mental illness.

Precision Population Health

Geomarkers are powerful predictors of a population’s health. What’s missing are the methods and tools to make reproducible geomarker assessment widely accessible and easily used by biomedical researchers.

Examples of geomarkers include:

Air pollution
Water pollution
Housing characteristics
Community material deprivation
Crime and violence
Access to community resources and healthcare
Climate change, extreme weather, natural disasters, wildfires
Greenspace and land use
Community resilience and social capital

Access to geomarker data opens the door for going from precision medicine to precision population health. To get there, we must overcome a few hurdles. Precise geolocation information is considered protected health information, which presents obstacles to data sharing and analysis.

It’s also difficult to automatically link geomarker data to existing studies and electronic health record (EHR) databases.

Curated, Public Geomarker Library

With funding from an R01 grant, we developed a curated and standardized library of geomarker assessment tools that researchers can use for efﬁcient, automated and reproducible linkage of geomarkers to their own data. We are developing a generalized framework that can be used to operationalize spatiotemporal exposure assessment data, tools and knowledge.

Our research envisions a sustainable resource to fuel the advancement of precision population health. To this end, we have worked to:

Create an initial library based on software containerization and automated metadata collection and publishing
Conduct a test implementation within an existing electronic health record informatics data pipeline
Obtain feedback from users and consumers
Create a framework for geomarker tool development that allows any user to interact with the software in a consistent and user-friendly way
Allow public toolset development so anyone can provide feedback and modiﬁcations or additions

The software, framework and library are free and open source. We want geomarker data and methods to be more ﬁndable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).

Air Pollution’s Impact

Multiple studies from Cincinnati Children’s researchers already show the link between air pollution and mental health issues in children.

Our current work focuses on studying the relationships between:

Daily changes in ambient ﬁne particulate matter and pediatric psychiatric exacerbations
Early life exposures to air pollution and increased risk of mental disorders during adolescence
Community characteristics and increased susceptibility to these air pollution-related health effects

For example, one of our recent studies found that exposure to airborne lead early in life is linked to anxiety and behavioral problems in adolescence.

Our partnership with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee gives us access to powerful and precise computer systems to further our work.

We believe this novel work represents a ﬁrst step toward allocating future regulatory efforts and resources and developing enhanced primary and secondary prevention and mitigation strategies.

Associated Research Labs

Brokamp Lab