MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health

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The environment in its broadest sense is the major underlying cause of the large variations in chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and cancers. These are often lifetime exposures to a range of environmental stressors and contaminants, including diet, air pollution, smoking, obesity which differ across populations and individuals.Traditionally the environmental health sciences have been dominated by the targeted toxicological and epidemiological assessment of a few chemical compounds one-at-a-time to provide assessment of safety. While this approach has worked well for some of the most toxic substances such as asbestos, risks to humans have mainly been studied in an occupational setting where exposures of the work force are typically several-fold higher than environmental exposures, or in short-term exposure chamber studies. Much of the evidence on toxicity has also relied on animal testing, but there are major issues when extrapolating results to humans. This not only reflects species differences, but the high doses often used in an experimental setting in animals may not translate to humans, who are typically exposed to low doses of pollutants, often acting in combination and over long periods of time. An integrated approach to the analysis of environment and health risks is required which takes advantage of new technologies applied to large-scale population studies. This requires advances in monitoring individual exposures thorough improved sensor technologies and the use of high resolution locational data Geographical Information Systems, small area approaches and new modeling techniques. Used together these can provide an integrated assessment of current (and future) risks that can be used to inform environmental public health policies. These methods and approaches can generate new knowledge on exposures, early biological effects and exposure-disease relationships, and are especially powerful when applied to large-scale epidemiological studies, as are available through the Centre cohorts. As we move to the next phase of Centre funding we plan to take advantage of the increasingly rich metadata that is available for our cohorts and to link these with primary care data records. We will further exploit the rich and unique data resources available to Centre researchers afforded by the UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU) at Imperial College and the Environmental Research Group (ERG) at King's College, and utilise the improved exposure assessment methods and application of omic technologies for a more integrated approach to environmental health research. This approach across our work programmes will allow us to focus activity around a conceptual framework that examines links from the molecular level through man to populations across the lifecourse and provide outputs to advance understanding and better inform environment and health policy.