Designs of studies on environment and children's health: Current status and development

Children's health is the foundation of the health and well-being of the entire population, and it is vital to the life-long development of children. Exposure to adverse environmental factors in early life has a lifelong impact on children's health. From the perspective of different research designs, this review introduced the current status of research related to environment and children's health and pointed out the short comings of the applied designs, including uncertain causality, insufficient strength of evidence, and lack of large-sample, prospective, multi-center, and representative birth cohort studies. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the establishment of birth cohorts to provide high-quality evidence for the formulation of public health policies related to environment and children's health.