Environmental impacts on the health of children in early childhood: scoping review protocol

METHODOLOGY This scoping review will be conducted based on the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology for scoping reviews. To construct the guiding question, the PCC strategy will be applied, which represents a mnemonic for: “P” Population (children aged 0 to 6), “C” Concept (environmental impacts on health) and “C” Context (any environment), to be defined as: What are the environmental impacts described in the literature that affect the health of children in early childhood? Searches for articles should be carried out in the scientific databases Pubmed, Web of Science, Virtual Health Library (BVCS), Scopus, Scielo and Embase, in the period from June 2025. Searches will be conducted using descriptors and their synonyms that appear in the health sciences descriptor (DeCS) and in the medical subject headings (MeSH), namely: environment, environmental pollutants, environmental pollution, pollution, impacts of pollution on health, health, child and children. Primary studies published in Portuguese, English and Spanish until May 31, 2025 will be included. Articles whose titles and abstracts do not fit within the scope of the research, as well as opinion articles, editorials, reviews and information from websites will be excluded. The reference lists of all selected studies will also be checked. After implementing the search strategy in each database, the references will be exported to the StArt (State of the Art through Systematic Review) web software. The StArt review tool was developed by the Software Engineering Research Laboratory (LaPES) of the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). The selection of studies will be carried out in two stages. The first selection will be carried out by reading the titles and abstracts, and the second stage will consist of reading the full article. The study selection process will be carried out by two researchers individually, and any disagreements will be discussed with a third researcher and resolved by consensus. After mapping the data, the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) will be used to extract the data. Relevant data will be extracted from each selected article, including authors, year, country where the study was conducted, study design and main results. These results will be presented in tables and in a descriptive format, addressing bibliometric aspects and answering the central question that will guide this scoping review.