Engaging residents to sustain healthier homes

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The proposed project, “Engaging Residents to Sustain Healthier Homes,” builds on 20 years of community- academic partnership to address health disparities in Rochester, NY through reducing low income families’ exposures to environmental hazards. Our research evaluates a low-cost intervention to reduce home-based environmental exposures through home health surveys and urine samples. The home is a major contributor to environmental exposures, particularly for pregnant women and young children. These exposures have significant implications for lifelong health disparities. New York State has been conducting a Healthy Neighborhoods Program (HNP) with community outreach workers for the past 30 years that involves education, low cost supplies, and referral to resources. This sustainable, low-cost intervention program has been shown to reduce certain home hazards and improve asthma outcomes; however, the impact on residents’ exposures has yet to be quantified through environmental (house dust) or biological (urine) monitoring, which may elucidate connections to other health outcomes including adverse neurodevelopmental and reproductive health effects. We aim to determine the impact of the HNP on resident exposure and use these results to inform future studies on the potential of a low-cost community-based intervention to improve maternal and child health outcomes. The proposed project leverages an existing HUD-funded intervention study (ROC HOME) involving analysis of dust in the homes of low-income homeowners in Rochester, NY. Half of the ROC HOME participants are receiving the HNP intervention; the other half are controls. We propose to add urine measurements to participants recruited from both arms of the ongoing ROC HOME study to explore urinary biomarkers of home environmental exposures among an understudied population for whom the HNP holds great potential for promoting environmental health. We will recruit 60 reproductive-aged women from the 100 ROC HOME study participants, collecting urine samples at two time points. Aim 1 will compare urine concentrations of pesticides, phthalates, and flame retardants post HNP intervention between treatment and control groups and estimate the association between exposure concentrations measured in household dust and urinary metabolite concentrations. Aim 2 will assess participant engagement in the home interventions before and after receiving their personal exposure results through a community partnership. The data collected will provide critical information to shape the design of future, scalable intervention studies that can measure the exposure reductions and health benefits of home- based hazard reduction interventions. Our long-term goal is to inform implementation and dissemination of low- cost, sustainable, community-based healthy home programs to reduce maternal and children’s exposure to environmental toxicants and promote lifelong health.