New Publication in Environmental Research

I co-authored an article in Environmental Research entitled “Revisiting the modifiable areal unit problem in the era of exposome-wide association studies: Assessing the performance of the CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index at privacy-protecting spatial scales” led by Jonathan Lewis.

We assessed the impact of the modifiable areal unit problem in the context of exposome-wide association study (ExWAS) designs with a simulation and case study using the Social Vulnerability Index from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Personalized Environment and Genes Study (PEGS).

With coarser spatial aggregation (e.g., U.S. Census Bureau census tracts vs. counties), models lost precision, empirical coverage decreased, model estimates were more biased, and statistical power was reduced. Investigators must weigh the trade-offs between epidemiologic efficacy and protect privacy when choosing the geospatial resolution of the analysis.