# The effect of childhood environments on adult health and mortality

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK · 2024 · $729,567

## Abstract

Project Abstract
Early life conditions shape later life health outcomes such as mortality. However, it is not known which early
conditions really matter and why. And are these conditions modifiable by policy? The absence of data that
inform both where individuals lived during childhood and adult health outcomes substantially limits studies on
this topic. To fill this significant gap, we propose constructing a new dataset to investigate the causal impacts
of two environmental conditions that can be modified by local authorities and that likely affect lifetime health:
the quality of school that children attend and the infectious disease environment in which they grow up.
Previous literature typically relies on state-level measures of school quality and uses all-cause early life
mortality in large areas (such as countries or states) as proxies for infectious disease environment. However,
both of these conditions vary enormously within states. In this proposed study, we will construct a new
dataset linking individual childhood environment determinants at a granular level to longevity for large
representative samples of Blacks and Whites (Aim 1). To our knowledge, it will be the largest individual
dataset that follows U.S. residents from birth to death among individuals that survive to middle age. Despite
abundant association studies on how these two conditions affect lifetime health and other outcomes, causal
evidence is rare. We will investigate the causal effects of school quality on adult health and longevity
(Aim 2). We will examine the extent to which individuals who attended high-quality schools in their city of birth
obtained more schooling, had greater returns to the same level of schooling, and lived longer than those who
attended low-quality schools, separately by race. We will follow the approaches of previous work (e.g.,
leveraging state minimum teacher wages) estimating the effects of school quality on economic outcomes but
apply them to investigate effects of substate-level school quality (e.g., average teacher salaries) on longevity.
We will estimate the causal effects of childhood infectious disease exposure on adult health and
longevity (Aim 3). To estimate causal effects of childhood infections (measured by city-level infectious
disease mortality), we will build on existing evidence that there was an important reduction in infectious
disease mortality in cities in the 1920s due to a reduction in immigration and the associated improvement in
living conditions that prevailed in cities. We will also conduct the analysis separately by race. Lastly, we will
examine the interaction of childhood education environment and infectious disease environment on
longevity and their joint effects on racial disparities (Aim 4). We will empirically test if these two
environments complement each other separately by race. We will assess the extent to which these two key
childhood environments explain inequality and racial disparities in longevity.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10944686
- **Project number:** 1R01AG088639-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK
- **Principal Investigator:** Dahai Yue
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $729,567
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-09-01 → 2029-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10944686

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10944686, The effect of childhood environments on adult health and mortality (1R01AG088639-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10944686. Licensed CC0.

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