MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health

从最广泛的意义上讲，环境是慢性病（如心血管疾病、呼吸系统疾病和癌症）发生巨大变化的主要潜在原因。这通常是指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，这些因素在人群和个人之间存在差异。传统上，环境健康科学主要是对几种化合物进行有针对性的毒理学和流行病学评估，以提供安全性评估。虽然这种方法对某些毒性最强的物质（如石棉）效果很好，但对人类的风险主要是在职业环境中进行的研究，在这种环境中，劳动力的接触通常比环境接触高几倍，或者在短期接触室进行研究。关于毒性的许多证据也依赖于动物试验，但在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，而且在实验环境中经常在动物身上使用的高剂量可能不会转化为人类，因为人类通常暴露于低剂量的污染物，通常是联合作用的，而且时间很长。需要对环境和健康风险进行综合分析，利用应用于大规模人口研究的新技术。这需要在监测个人暴露方面取得进展，彻底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。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。这些方法和方法可以产生关于接触、早期生物效应和接触-疾病关系的新知识，并且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。当我们进入中心资助的下一阶段时，我们计划利用我们的队列可用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单位（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而独特的数据资源，并利用改进的暴露评估方法和基因组学技术的应用，对环境健康研究采取更综合的方法。在我们的工作方案中采用这种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到人到整个生命过程中的人口之间的联系，并提供产出，以促进理解并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.