Human biomonitoring: structural equation models

Abstract

The project was about assessing the mediating effect of different exposures or the indirect effect of selected covariate(s) on the outcome of interest, data from a study conducted by VITO in the years 2008-2011 in Flanders, Belgium was analysed. The data was collected from 8 regions in Flanders with different enviromental characteristics. The participants were recruited by a stratified clustered multi-stage design and belonged to 3 different age groups namely newborns and their mothers, 14-15 year adolescents and 50-65 years adults. In the study, exposures to various pollutants such as cadmium, lead, thallium, benzene among others were of interest. For this project, a subset of the data collected from adolescents aged between 14-15 years was analysed. Potentially useful covariates were pre-selected and the exposures considered were thallium, cadmium and hydroxy pyrene.