In a new study that could help both doctors and policymakers improve preventative care, researchers from ATHLETE’s partner organisation ISGlobal identified key environmental stressors that impact child health.
The environment in which a child grows up in greatly affects their development and health later in life. Growing up in a city, exposure to chemicals and pollution, as well as social experiences, all influence children’s health.
Child health and the environment
Using data from 1,622 European mothers and children from six countries, the study looked at how living in cities, being exposed to chemicals, and other experiences before birth and during childhood, work together to influence children’s mental, cardiovascular and respiratory health. Using machine learning, they were able to identify effects, but also quantify the likelihood of children developing health issues based on their environmental exposures, medical history, and current health status.
The study, published in Communications Medicine, found that maternal stress, exposure to noise, metabolic health, and various lifestyle factors play the biggest role in child mental health. They also identified biological factors, including child BMI and the presence of specific proteins and metabolites, that can predict risk of cardiometabolic and respiratory health.
The study used supervised machine learning, a field of artificial intelligence in which an algorithm is trained using large, labelled datasets and can then make predictions on new datasets.
Implications for public health
Due to the focus on adult health in research, current clinical tests often fail to identify children at risk of developing chronic diseases. Being the first study to develop environmental-clinical risk scores for child mental, cardiometabolic, and respiratory health, this research takes a step forward to address this gap with significant implications for preventative care and treatment.
The study also found complex interactions and patterns of effects between environmental and clinical factors that confirm the importance of taking a holistic approach to studying environmental impacts, through the human exposome.
“Our findings provide valuable insights into the combination of various environmental risk factors affecting child health. This information can help policymakers and healthcare practitioners create tailored preventive measures to protect children from harmful exposures, ultimately safeguarding public health,” says Dr Léa Maitre, Assistant Research Professor at ISGlobal and author of the study.
Reference
Guimbaud, JB., Siskos, A.P., Sakhi, A.K. et al. Machine learning-based health environmental-clinical risk scores in European children. Communications Medicine 4, 98 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43856-024-00513-y