MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health

从最广泛的意义上讲，环境是造成心血管疾病、呼吸道疾病和癌症等慢性病差异巨大的主要根本原因。这些通常是终生暴露于一系列环境压力源和污染物，包括饮食、空气污染、吸烟、肥胖，这些在人群和个人中是不同的。传统上，环境健康科学主要是对一些化学化合物进行有针对性的毒理学和流行病学评估，每次一种，以提供安全评估。虽然这种方法对石棉等一些毒性最大的物质效果良好，但对人类的风险主要是在劳动力接触通常比环境接触高几倍的职业环境中或在短期接触室研究中进行的。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时存在重大问题。这不仅反映了物种差异，而且在动物实验环境中经常使用的高剂量可能不会转化为人类，人类通常暴露于低剂量的污染物，这些污染物通常在很长一段时间内联合作用。需要采取综合办法分析环境和健康风险，利用应用于大规模人口研究的新技术。这就需要通过改进传感器技术和使用高分辨率位置数据、地理信息系统、小区域方法和新的建模技术，在监测个人照射方面取得进展。综合使用这些方法可以对当前（和未来）的风险进行综合评估，从而为环境公共卫生政策提供信息。这些方法和办法可以产生关于接触、早期生物效应和疾病与疾病关系的新知识，在应用于大规模流行病学研究时特别有效，如通过中心的队列研究。随着我们进入中心资助的下一阶段，我们计划利用我们的队列提供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。我们将进一步利用丰富和独特的数据资源提供给中心的研究人员由英国小区域健康统计单位（SAHSU）在帝国理工学院和环境研究小组（ERG）在国王学院，并利用改进的暴露评估方法和组学技术的应用，为环境健康研究提供更综合的方法。在我们的工作方案中采取这种做法，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到人到整个生命周期的人口之间的联系，并提供产出，以促进理解，更好地为环境和卫生政策提供信息。

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.