With the aid of a $1.78 million planning grant from the National Institutes of Health, an interdisciplinary research team based at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences will soon launch the Duke Center for Geospatial Medicine to study the relationship between the environmental and scientific aspects of health.
“The center is focused on developing methods for assessing and analyzing the pathways through which the environment, genetics and psychosocial domains jointly shape children’s health and well-being,” said Marie Lynn Miranda, Gabel associate professor of the practice in environmental ethics and sustainable environmental management.
Miranda will serve as the principal investigator and director of the new center, which will be based at the Nicholas School. “It’s more a center in terms of activities and intellectual momentum as opposed to having walls around it,” she said.
The grant is funded through the NIH Roadmap Initiative, which promotes innovative research pertinent to the advancement of science and medicine. If the researchers are successful at the end of three years, they will be positioned to apply for a full-fledged center at Duke.
“From my perspective, one of the most exciting things about the center is that we have successfully built a team of researchers drawn from Arts and Sciences, the Nicholas School and the Medical Center,” Miranda said.
Jonathan Freedman, co-director of the center and associate professor of environmental toxicology at the Nicholas School, also expressed enthusiasm for the interdisciplinary nature of the research. “Each of us can look at the problem, but we can only look at it in our small sphere of knowledge,” he said. “There are certain questions that can’t be answered without this type of collaboration.”
The center will initially focus its investigations on neural tube defects, a birth defect that causes severe, and sometimes fatal, complications. The researchers are in a prime location to conduct a joint study of the disease.
“For reasons that we don’t understand, it seems to be twice as common in North and South Carolina as in other parts of the U.S,” said Marcy Speer, co-director of the center and associate professor at the Center for Human Genetics and the Departments of Medicine, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
Neural tube defects occur when the neural tube, which eventually goes to form the brain and spine, fails to close properly. In the head region, a neural tube defect causes a fatal brain defect. In the base of the spine, other problems arise. “Sometimes [the children] need braces, wheelchairs, [experience] bowel and bladder problems and have difficulties with walking and ambulation,” Speer said.
She noted that possible explanations for the geographic concentration include susceptibility to environmental toxins and the pooling of genes in areas with little geographic mobility. “It’s also more common in people with lower socioeconomic status, and is probably related to diet,” Speer said.
The team is currently considering a variety of potential data sources, including genetic data and the Toxic Release Inventory, a data base of registered toxins that various power plants release into the environment.
“Part of the exploration is to try to learn about what people are being exposed to, and to try to link exposure to the actual defect,” said Alan Gelfand, statistics professor and collaborator on the project. “There is probably some evidence that there could be some environmental inequities in all of this and that’s one of the things that we’re hoping to learn a little bit more about.”
While the center plans to focus on neural tube defects for the next few years, future plans are already in progress. “Next phase decisions will depend on what strategies work and which don’t,” Speer said. Other possible children’s health problems that the center might study include obesity, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, malnutrition, asthma, heart disease and arthritis. The potential to study adult health problems also exists.
The center’s researchers hope to develop new methods for examining complex heath problems. “Maybe it will serve as a model for other universities that also support this kind of collaboration,” Freedman said. “Maybe we’ll start a brand new field of research.”
Miranda’s expectations are high for the research and its social impact. “Our hope and our belief is that these new methods will be successful in both helping us to understand adverse and positive outcomes for children an consequently develop interventions that are protective of children,” Miranda said. “The overall goal is to create environments where all children can prosper.”
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