# National Cohort Studies of Alzheimer's Disease, Related Dementias and Air Pollution

> **NIH NIH R01** · HARVARD UNIVERSITY D/B/A HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH · 2022 · $238,197

## Abstract

Project Summary
Background. The specific aims of the parent grant (R01 AG066793) are to conduct national epidemiological
studies of Medicare and Medicaid claims to estimate the effects of long-term exposures to air pollution on
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (ADRD) hospitalization and disease progression (Aim 1), to
apply machine learning methods to identify co-occurrence of individual-level, environmental, and societal factors
that lead to increase vulnerability (Aim 2), and to develop statistical methods to disentangle the effects of air
pollution exposure from other confounding factors and to correct for potential outcome misclassification (Aim
3). The parent R01 relies on a wide range of epidemiological data ranging from environmental exposures, to
claims data, to meteorological and socioeconomic factors. While we curated massive amounts of data for the
parent R01, the data has not been deposited to a public data repository and we have not made it publicly
available.
Overall Goals. With this supplement our goal is to enable effective dissemination and reuse for high-dimensional
high-volume data, including the data products from the parent R01. These goals will be achieved by forming a
new collaboration and partnership with Harvard dataverse, expanding their current capacity to store and share
geospatial public health data. Our specific aims are to: implement automatic metadata extraction for high
dimensional dataset formats NetCDF and HDF5 (Aim 1), implement an integration with Jupyter Binder that
allows exploration and viewing of complex high-dimensional data from Dataverse (Aim 2), enhance reuse,
community engagement and reproducibility of R01 research with the demonstration of data analysis using
synthetic CMS claims data (Aim 3).
Impact. Each new feature in the Dataverse software platform, such as the ones proposed in Aims 1 and 2, is
typically propagated to all 77 Dataverse installations, which enhances their impact worldwide. Dataverse also
has a vibrant community of open-source contributors and digital libraries, and organizes annual community
meetings at Harvard that last for several days. We will use this platform to promote the work in this supplement
and engage the community and attend other workshops and conferences with the same goal. We will closely
follow the impact of these developments through an existing Dataverse collaboration with the Make Data Count
project, which provides usage metrics standardization (such as the number of views, downloads, and citations
of data), and enables us to self-modify and improve our data releases. This supplement will also have a direct
impact on the parent R01, enhancing reuse, community engagement and reproducibility which will in turn lead
to more robust epidemiological conclusions (Aim 3).

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10594215
- **Project number:** 3R01AG066793-02S2
- **Recipient organization:** HARVARD UNIVERSITY D/B/A HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
- **Principal Investigator:** Antonella Zanobetti
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $238,197
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2020-04-01 → 2025-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10594215

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10594215, National Cohort Studies of Alzheimer's Disease, Related Dementias and Air Pollution (3R01AG066793-02S2). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10594215. Licensed CC0.

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