The aim of the proposed project is a thorough analysis of UK Biobank data in order to quantify social inequalities related to environmental exposures with a focus on air pollution, noise and greenspaces.
There are two major aspects in quantifying social inequalities: Often environmental exposures are unequally distributed within a society. Thus, the first step has to be to gather evidence which social positions are the driving factors for this imbalance. In practice, we will investigate whether specific social positions defined by gender, ethnicity and income among others and combinations thereof lead to higher (or lower) prevalence of exposure.
Secondly, vulnerability might also depend on social positions and their interplay. For instance, effects of environmental exposures on health-related outcomes such as respiratory and cardiovascular diseases as well as mental health may differ across these social subgroups.
Both of these aspects, exposure variation and differential vulnerability, may contribute to increasing health inequalities. A thorough analysis of these research questions will be conducted by state-of-the-art methods such as random and causal forests. These methods are designed to identify the most influential factors contributing to exposure variation and effect heterogeneity respectively. The public health impact of the project is the identification of higher exposed and more vulnerable population groups. This may help to target social groups with the highest prevention potential which in turn can contribute to reduce environmental and social inequalities.
The expected duration of the project is 36 months. We wish to analyse the full cohort.
