MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health

从最广泛的意义上讲，环境是心血管疾病、呼吸系统疾病和癌症等慢性疾病差异较大的主要潜在原因。这些通常是终生暴露在一系列环境应激源和污染物中，包括饮食、空气污染、吸烟、肥胖，这些因素因人群和个人而异。传统上，环境健康科学一直以对几种化合物进行有针对性的毒理学和流行病学评估为主导，一次一种，以提供安全性评估。虽然这种方法对一些毒性最强的物质，如石棉，效果很好，但对人类的风险主要是在工人暴露的职业环境中进行的，或者是在短期暴露室内研究中进行的。许多关于毒性的证据也依赖于动物试验，但将结果外推到人类身上存在重大问题。这不仅反映了物种的差异，而且在动物实验环境中经常使用的高剂量可能不适用于人类，因为人类通常暴露在低剂量的污染物中，往往是联合作用和长时间的。需要一种综合的方法来分析环境和健康风险，这种方法利用了应用于大规模人口研究的新技术。这需要通过改进传感器技术和使用高分辨率定位数据地理信息系统、小区域办法和新的建模技术，在监测个人照射方面取得进展。这些指标结合在一起可以提供对当前(和未来)风险的综合评估，可用于为环境公共卫生政策提供信息。这些方法和方法可以产生关于暴露、早期生物效应和暴露-疾病关系的新知识，在应用于通过中心队列提供的大规模流行病学研究时尤其有效。随着我们进入中心筹资的下一阶段，我们计划利用我们的队列可获得的日益丰富的元数据，并将这些元数据与初级保健数据记录联系起来。我们将进一步利用帝国理工学院的英国小区域卫生统计组(SAHSU)和国王学院的环境研究小组(ERG)为中心研究人员提供的丰富和独特的数据资源，并利用改进的接触评估方法和OMIC技术的应用，以更综合的方式进行环境卫生研究。这种贯穿我们工作方案的方法将使我们能够围绕一个概念框架开展活动，该框架审查从分子水平通过人到整个生命周期的人口之间的联系，并提供产出以增进了解并更好地宣传环境和卫生政策。

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.