CHE recognizes that the chemical, biologic, physical, nutritional, built, natural and socioeconomic environments combine to create conditions that strongly influence the health of individuals and populations. We include social determinants of health under this umbrella because we recognize that poverty and other social stressors - along with chemical exposures and other factors - are all part of the environment in which we are born, grow and live. An ecologic model should be valuable even to someone focused on only a portion of it.ĬHE follows scientific research on any health concern linked to environmental contributors: everything besides hereditary factors that can impact health. ![]() Health and disease patterns are largely determined by multi-level system conditions. They feature interactions and feedback loops. All models are simplifications-some more than others depending on where boundaries are set on what is included and what is left out.Įcologic models attempt to represent dynamic relationships within a nested hierarchy of person-family-community-ecosystem-society-planetary levels. Implicit or explicit models fundamentally direct research design and decision-making. Models represent how we think about, study and try to influence outcomes amidst this complexity. ![]() And neurodevelopmental disorders are notorious for their overlapping mixtures of problems with attention, behavior, and cognitive and motor function. For example, underlying changes in the lungs and immune systems of people with asthma and exposures that trigger their wheezing can be quite different from one person to another. Variations in the manifestations of many disorders challenge the ways we classify diseases. Some, like neighborhood safety, air pollution, chemicals in consumer products, and food quality and availability are community-or even societal-level features influencing the health of everyone living there-albeit some more than others. But these so-called risk factors do not exist only at the individual level. Asthma, for example, can be caused or triggered by combinations of toxic chemical exposures, environmental contaminants, inadequate nutrition and social stress, among others. 1Īsthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, various kinds of cancer, cognitive decline, dementia, reproductive disorders, neurodevelopmental problems and many others arise from multi-level, multifactorial circumstances. ![]() Gene-environment interactions largely determine the health of people and populations, although as epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose pointed out years ago the causes of a disease in an individual person frequently differ from the determinants of the incidence of that disease in populations. Ecologic models of health attempt to portray this multi-level complexity. The health of any part or the whole of this nested set of relationships is dependent on diverse, dynamic interactions among them all. It’s a concept that cannot apply solely to an individual since people and other beings have always lived within families, communities, ecosystems, and planetary-level conditions.
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