# Principal Component Pursuit to Assess Exposure to Environmental Mixtures in Epidemiologic Studies

> **NIH NIH R01** · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2021 · $513,804

## Abstract

Project Summary
Traditionally, environmental epidemiologic studies have focused on assessing risks related to a single pollutant
at a time. This, however, does not reflect reality, since we are constantly exposed to multiple pollutants at
once. It is very important, therefore, to be able to assess exposure to pollutant mixtures when conducting
environmental epidemiologic methods. Doing so, however, is especially challenging, mainly due to the high
dimension of the multi-pollutant exposure matrix (if the exposure of interest includes more than e.g. 5 or 10
chemicals) and because these pollutants are usually very highly correlated with each other. Although some
methods are available to address these issues, they usually require strong assumptions and have severe
limitations. With this study we propose to bypass most of these limitations by adapting and extending a novel
and robust method to assess exposure to multiple pollutants, called Principal Component Pursuit (PCP). We
will assess the performance of PCP synthetic datasets representing multiple potential scenarios and study
designs, and compare our results to those obtained by existing methods. Subsequently, we will apply PCP to
three important Public Health issues, i.e. to evaluate the associations between (i) in utero exposure to a
mixture of PCBs and neurodevelopment, (ii) exposure to a metals mixture and cardiovascular health, and (iii)
exposure to an air pollution mixture and emergency cardiovascular admissions. Finally, we will develop and
share software so other researchers can freely use this novel, robust and flexible tool across a plethora of
study designs and research questions. Our proposed work will be significant as it will provide epidemiologists
with a novel and robust tool to assess exposure to environmental pollutant mixtures.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10078271
- **Project number:** 5R01ES028805-04
- **Recipient organization:** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $513,804
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-01-01 → 2022-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10078271

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10078271, Principal Component Pursuit to Assess Exposure to Environmental Mixtures in Epidemiologic Studies (5R01ES028805-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10078271. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*