The Michigan PBB Cohort: A unique, highly exposed community followed for 50 years and three generations - In 1973, millions of Michigan residents were exposed to polybrominated biphenyls (PBB), a flame-retardant chemical, in what is considered one of the largest environmental disasters in US history and led to the creation of the Michigan PBB Registry. At 50 years old, this environmental epidemiology cohort (EEC) is one of the longest running multigenerational cohorts in the US with over 7,500 participants, making it uniquely situated for studying the health effects of an endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC) across the lifecourse and across generations. Since 2011, the Michigan PBB EEC has had strong community-researcher partnerships with the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force, PBB Citizen Advisory Board, and Mid-Michigan District Health Department. The Michigan PBB EEC primarily consists of people who were exposed to PBB as adults. In this proposal, we seek to expand community engagement and participation in the PBB EEC to include younger generations through community meetings and focus groups. The expanded cohort will facilitate future research on the generational impacts of EDCs, including biological mechanisms. To date, the Michigan PBB EEC has produced >150 scientific contributions with continuous federal research funding since 1996. We now propose to expand collaboration with participants and scholars from the region where the PBB contamination occurred. We will ensure that this valuable cohort is accessible to trainees and researchers beyond Emory University. We will update the participants’ health status and link PBB EEC data to several cancer registries. We will enhance the Researcher and Participant Portals, improving communication, documentation and metadata, harmonizing standard language and common data elements for optimal data sharing, building family pedigrees to enable generational research, and disseminating our continuing medical education course on EDCs to healthcare providers. The Michigan PBB EEC has trained students since 1996, training 12 postdoctoral fellows and 89 graduate and undergraduate students at multiple colleges and universities. To increase the number of researchers who work with the Michigan PBB EEC, we will promote the Researcher Portal at scientific conferences. Overall, this infrastructure grant will allow the Michigan PBB EEC to continue to expand not only its participants, but trainees and researchers who can learn and generate new scientific knowledge from this unique cohort.
