This Request for Information (RFI) seeks input on how to best collect and integrate environmental health data into the All of Us Research Program dataset.
The All of Us Research Program
The All of Us Research Program seeks to accelerate health research and medical breakthroughs to enable individualized prevention, treatment, and care for all of us. To do this, the program will partner with one million or more participants nationwide and build one of the most diverse biomedical data resources of its kind. Researchers may leverage the All of Us platform for thousands of studies on a wide range of health conditions.
Diversity is one of the core values of the All of Us Research Program. The program aims to reflect the diversity of the United States and has a special focus on engaging communities that have been underrepresented in health research in the past. Participants are from different races, ethnicities, age groups, and regions of the country. They are also diverse in gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, educational attainment, and health status.
Importance of Environmental Data for All of Us
The precision medicine approach considers an individual’s biology, lifestyle, and environment to make more individualized preventive and medical care decisions. The collection of environmental data is critical for researchers using the All of Us resource to make discoveries that advance our understanding of how the environment influences health. The All of Us Research Program plans to use data linkages to pair participant data with data from existing national datasets that collect environmental information. In addition, All of Us is well positioned to collect environmental data from its planned cohort of at least one million diverse participants through surveys, wearable devices, and future geospatial linkages.
Responses will be accepted through May 31st, 2022.
NOT-PM-22-001
We are seeking information about innovative ways to collect environmental data from the All of Us cohort. Respondents may address one or more of the following topics of interest:
- “Environmental exposure” can mean many things to different people. For your own research interests, please use the following broad categories of environmental exposure to describe the most important categories of data for All of Us to collect as part of its core data collection protocol (Section 7). (Describe only those that apply to your research.)
- Lifestyle(including diet, substance use, etc.)
- Occupational exposures
- Criteria air pollutants (PM2.5, NO2, etc.), short-term
- Criteria air pollutants (PM2.5, NO2, etc.), annual-average
- Hazardous air pollutants (Benzene, PAHs, etc.), short-term
- Hazardous air pollutants (Benzene, PAHs, etc.), annual-average
- Personal care and other personal use product chemicals
- Endocrine disrupting or mimicking compounds
- Pesticides
- Longitudinal measures of neighborhood socioeconomics and structure
- Enhanced particulate matter and aerosol metrices (e.g. components, origin, dry/wet/gaseous phase, and deposition and sedimentation characteristics)
- High-resolution land-use and land-cover change measures (e.g. urban density, forest loss)
- Point source proximity metrics including distance to animal feeding operations, superfund, landfill and hazardous waste sites
- Weather and atmospheric conditions
- Natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, severe weather events)
- Indicators of climate and climate change including temperature extremes and seasonal variability
- Others
- For your own research, what are one or two environmental measures that would be most important for All of Us to collect?