Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE
Volume 24, Issue 1, Pages 107-127Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/13658810802443457
Keywords
Geographical detectors; Disease; Determinants; Spatial consistence; Birth risk
Categories
Funding
- Natural Science Foundation of China [40471111, 70571076]
- Ministry of Science and Technology of China [2001CB5130, 2007CB5119001, 2006AA12Z215, 2007AA12Z241, 2007DFC20180]
- Chinese Academy of Sciences [KZCX2-YW308]
- California Air Resources Board, USA [55245A]
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Physical environment, man-made pollution, nutrition and their mutual interactions can be major causes of human diseases. These disease determinants have distinct spatial distributions across geographical units, so that their adequate study involves the investigation of the associated geographical strata. We propose four geographical detectors based on spatial variation analysis of the geographical strata to assess the environmental risks of health: the risk detector indicates where the risk areas are; the factor detector identifies factors that are responsible for the risk; the ecological detector discloses relative importance between the factors; and the interaction detector reveals whether the risk factors interact or lead to disease independently. In a real-world study, the primary physical environment (watershed, lithozone and soil) was found to strongly control the neural tube defects (NTD) occurrences in the Heshun region (China). Basic nutrition (food) was found to be more important than man-made pollution (chemical fertilizer) in the control of the spatial NTD pattern. Ancient materials released from geological faults and subsequently spread along slopes dramatically increase the NTD risk. These findings constitute valuable input to disease intervention strategies in the region of interest.
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