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Diabetes affects millions of people globally and can lead to other severe health complications when undiagnosed or not properly managed. The incidence of diabetes has rapidly increased over the past several years, however, not all individuals have access to affordable or convenient healthcare. We hypothesize that wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has the potential to assess community health status by analyzing biomarkers indicative of human health and disease, including diabetes. Used in tandem with current methods, monitoring indicators of diabetes in community wastewater could provide a comprehensive assessment tool for disease prevalence in large and small populations. Specifically, the proposed targeted biomarker evaluated in this study to indicate population-wide diabetes prevalence was 8-hydroxy-2’- deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG). This work combines a rigorous literature review and initial laboratory studies to explore the possibility of diabetes monitoring at the community level using WBE. Here, 24-hour composite wastewater samples were collected from within two wastewater sub-catchments of Greater Tempe, AZ. Overall goals of this study were to: i) Determine the feasibility to detect endogenous markers of diabetes in community wastewater; ii) Assess the potential impact of confounding factors, such as smoking, cancer, and atherosclerosis, through a literature analysis; and iii) Evaluate the socioeconomic status and demographics of the study population. Preliminary results of the experiments suggest this methodology to be feasible, as indicated by the observation of detectable signals of 8-OHdG in community wastewater collected from the sewer infrastructure; however, future work and continued experimentation will be required to address low signal intensity and assay precision and accuracy. Thus, the work presented here provides valuable proof-of-concept data, with detailed information on the method employed and identified opportunities to further determine the relationship between 8-OHdG concentrations in municipal wastewater and diabetes prevalence at the community level.
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Diabetes affects millions of people globally and can lead to other severe health complications when undiagnosed or not properly managed. The incidence of diabetes has rapidly increased over the past several years, however, not all individuals have access to affordable or convenient healthcare. We hypothesize that wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has the potential to assess community health status by analyzing biomarkers indicative of human health and disease, including diabetes. Used in tandem with current methods, monitoring indicators of diabetes in community wastewater could provide a comprehensive assessment tool for disease prevalence in large and small populations. Specifically, the proposed targeted biomarker evaluated in this study to indicate population-wide diabetes prevalence was 8-hydroxy-2’-deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG). This work combines a rigorous literature review and initial laboratory studies to explore the possibility of diabetes monitoring at the community level using WBE. Here, 24-hour composite wastewater samples were collected from within two wastewater sub-catchments of Greater Tempe, AZ. Overall goals of this study were to: i) Determine the feasibility to detect endogenous markers of diabetes in community wastewater; ii) Assess the potential impact of confounding factors, such as smoking, cancer, and atherosclerosis, through a literature analysis; and iii) Evaluate the socioeconomic status and demographics of the study population. Preliminary results of the experiments suggest this methodology to be feasible, as indicated by the observation of detectable signals of 8-OHdG in community wastewater collected from the sewer infrastructure; however, future work and continued experimentation will be required to address low signal intensity and assay precision and accuracy. Thus, the work presented here provides valuable proof-of-concept data, with detailed information on the method employed and identified opportunities to further determine the relationship between 8-OHdG concentrations in municipal wastewater and diabetes prevalence at the community level.
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Currently, there are a number of studies confirming the link between exposure to certain chemicals, notably pesticides (Costello et. al. 2009, Wang et. al 2014), heavy metals such as arsenic (Chen et. al. 2017), ambient air pollution (Chen et. al. 2016), and chemicals specific to certain industrial fields (Nielsen et. al. 2021). However, few papers have attempted to perform a widespread analysis of the factors associated with Parkinson’s disease to identify whether the risk of developing the disease is dependent on different factors regionally. The goal of my thesis project is to complete a meta-analysis of toxins- where exposure may occur in both residential and occupational settings- that are associated with Parkinson’s to determine such regional differences and to identify any gaps in current literature, which may direct the course of future research in the field. As seen in this paper, it appears that occupational exposure to toxins appears to have the greatest impact on the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, particularly pesticides and industrial toxins. However, there are numerous gaps with regards to data collection, regions studied, and quantification of toxin concentrations. However, this data may be useful in identifying at-risk populations if more extensive incremental and biopsy data regarding these toxins is provided.
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