June 12, 2018 By David Cutler, Francesca Dominici President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt have pledged to reexamine landmark environmental policies and to repeal regulations. In their view, excessive regulations are harming US industry, and thus reducing regulation will be good for business. As Donald Trump has said, seemingly without irony, “We are going to get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us.…
A Causal Exposure Response Function with Local Adjustment for Confounding
June 4, 2018 By Georgia Papadogeorgou, Francesca Dominici In the last two decades, ambient levels of air pollution have declined substantially. Yet, as mandated by the Clean Air Act, we must continue to address the following question: is exposure to levels of air pollution that are well below the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) harmful to human health? Furthermore, the highly contentious nature surrounding environmental regulations necessitates casting this…
Continue reading “A Causal Exposure Response Function with Local Adjustment for Confounding”
Estimating Population Average Causal Effects in the Presence of Non-Overlap: A Bayesian Approach
May 24, 2018 By Rachel Nethery, Fabrizia Mealli, and Francesca Dominici Most causal inference studies rely on the assumption of positivity, or overlap, to identify population or sample average causal effects. When this assumption is violated, these estimands are unidentifiable without some degree of reliance on model specifications, due to poor data support. Existing methods to address non-overlap, such as trimming or down-weighting data in regions of poor support, all…
JAMA Forum: A Breath of Bad Air: Trump Environmental Agenda May Lead to 80 000 Extra Deaths per Decade
JAMA Forum | May 10, 2018 By David Cutler, PhD, and Francesca Dominici, PhD President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt have pledged to reexamine landmark environmental policies and to repeal regulations. In their view, excessive regulations are harming US industry, and thus reducing regulation will be good for business. As Donald Trump has said, seemingly without irony, “We are going to get rid of the…
Clever use of public data could sidestep new rule
Science | May 4, 2018 Critics of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) move last week to limit the agency’s use of nonpublic data say it is a thinly veiled effort to prevent regulators from drawing on public health studies that have proved pivotal to justifying tougher air pollution limits. Recently, however, one research team has demonstrated what could be a way around the policy. They used publicly available data to…
Continue reading “Clever use of public data could sidestep new rule”
Association of Short-term Exposure to Air Pollution With Mortality in Older Adults
JAMA | December 26, 2017 What is the association between short-term exposure to air pollution below current air quality standards and all-cause mortality? In a case-crossover study of more than 22 million deaths, each 10-μg/m3 daily increase in fine particulate matter and 10–parts-per-billion daily increase in warm-season ozone exposures were associated with a statistically significant increase of 1.42 and 0.66 deaths per 1 million persons at risk per day, respectively.…
Impact of National Ambient Air Quality Standards nonattainment designations on particulate pollution and health
Epidemiology | October 31, 2017 Despite dramatic air quality improvement in the United States over the past decades, recent years have brought renewed scrutiny and uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of specific regulatory programs for continuing to improve air quality and public health outcomes. Read abstract here
High-dimensional confounding adjustment using continuous spike and slab priors
In observational studies, estimation of a causal effect of a treatment on an outcome relies on proper adjustment for confounding. If the number of the potential confounders ( p ) is larger than the number of observations ( n ), then direct control for all potential confounders is infeasible. Existing approaches for dimension reduction and penalization are generally aimed at predicting the outcome, and are less suited for estimation of…
Continue reading “High-dimensional confounding adjustment using continuous spike and slab priors”
Propensity scores with misclassified treatment assignment: a likelihood-based adjustment
Oxford University Press | April 17, 2017 Propensity score methods are widely used in comparative effectiveness research using claims data. In this context, the inaccuracy of procedural or billing codes in claims data frequently misclassifies patients into treatment groups, that is, the treatment assignment ($T$) is often measured with error. In the context of a validation data where treatment assignment is accurate, we show that misclassification of treatment assignment can impact…
Best Practices for Gauging Evidence of Causality in Air Pollution Epidemiology
American Journal of Epidemiology | September 6, 2017 The contentious political climate surrounding air pollution regulations has brought some researchers and policy makers to argue that evidence of causality is necessary for more stringent regulations. Recently, an increasing number of air pollution studies purport the use of “causal analysis,” generating the impression that studies not explicitly labeled as such are merely “associational” and therefore less rigorous. Using three prominent air…
Continue reading “Best Practices for Gauging Evidence of Causality in Air Pollution Epidemiology”