Approved research

Air Pollution, Noise and Cardio-respiratory diseases-BioSHaRE Environmental Core Project

Lay summary

Research has reported harmful effects of ambient air pollution and road traffic noise on the human cardiorespiratory system. However, there are few studies to date looking at these two environmental risk factors jointly to investigate the cardiovascular and respiratory effects. This proposed project aims to quantify the separate and joint effects of air pollution and noise exposure on cardiovascular and respiratory outcomes at the individual level, specifically cardiovascular diseases (ICD-10 codes I00-I99), Asthma (ICD-10 codes J45) and levels of bio-chemical markers for cardiovascular diseases including blood lipids, C-reactive protein, blood glucose. We propose to use the whole cohort of UK Biobank to address our research questions. Questionnaire data including demographic, socioeconomic, and lifestyle data will be requested. Health outcome data will be ascertained both on the basis of self-report and medical records. Inpatient data with regards to all incident hospital admissions according to primary and underlying admissions causes coded under ICD-10 I00-I99 (cardiovascular diseases) will be requested. We also request data from death registry linkage-coded according to underlying (primary) and contributory (secondary) ICD-10 I00-I99. The asthma outcome will be ascertained by self-reported data at this stage. These data will be harmonised in line with those from four other cohorts involved in this BioSHaRE-funded project, namely HUNT(Norway), Lifelines (the Netherlands), EPIC-Oxford (UK), EPIC-Turin (Italy). Environmental exposure data (air pollution and noise) at the time of recruitment were created through linkage of individual address data to geocoded databases at Imperial College,London. The ultimate objective is to pool harmonised data from all these five Biobanks including UK Biobank for epidemiological analysis. This project fits well with the UK Biobank?s central aim. It will help better understand the environmental determinants of cardio-respiratory disease by disentangling the health effects of these two exposures and thereby inform targeted preventive strategies and contribute to scientific knowledge.