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Mouthing activity data for children aged 7 to 35 months in Taiwan

Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology volume 25, pages 388–398 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Young children’s mouthing activities thought to be among the most important exposure pathways. Unfortunately, mouthing activity studies have only been conducted in a few countries. In the current study, we used videotaping and computer-based translating method to obtain mouthing activity data for 66 children aged 7–35 months in Taiwan. The median indoor hand-to-mouth and object-to-mouth frequencies were 8.91 and 11.39 contacts/h, respectively. The median indoor hand-to-mouth and object-to-mouth hourly contact durations were 0.34 and 0.46 min/h, respectively. The indoor object-to-mouth activities were significantly and negatively correlated with age. Children aged 12 to <24 months in the current study had lower indoor hand-to-mouth and object-to-mouth frequencies than children of same age group in the United States. We also found that indoor mouthing duration with pacifier was significantly and negatively correlated with indoor mouthing duration with other non-dietary objects. The results of the current study indicate that the mouthing behaviors may be different between different countries or populations with different ethnic or lifestyle characteristics. We conclude that using hand-to-mouth frequency values from the current literature may not be most reliable for estimating non-dietary exposures of young children living in Taiwan or even in other similar Asian countries.

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Acknowledgements

This project was supported by the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration (project no. EPA-100-G101-03-A036 and EPA-101-GA101-02-A143). The United States Environmental Protection Agency through its Office of Research and Development collaborated in the research described hereunder. Although it has been subjected to Agency review and approved for publication, it may not necessarily reflect official EPA policy. Dr. Beamer was supported by K25HL103970 from NHLBI and the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center (NIEHS P30 ES006694). The content is solely the work of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. We thank Professor Colin Ong from Stanford University for providing the VTD software.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Health, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Ming-Chien Tsou, Winston Dang & Ling-Chu Chien

  2. National Exposure Research Laboratory, Office of Research and Development, US Environmental Protection Agency (E205-01), Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA

    Halûk Özkaynak

  3. Environmental Health Sciences, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Paloma Beamer

  4. Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsing-Cheng Hsi

  5. Department of Pediatrics, Taipei Mackay Memorial Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

    Chuen-Bin Jiang

  6. Mackay Junior College of Medicine, Nursing and Management, Taipei, Taiwan

    Chuen-Bin Jiang

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Tsou, MC., Özkaynak, H., Beamer, P. et al. Mouthing activity data for children aged 7 to 35 months in Taiwan. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 25, 388–398 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2014.50

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