Investigating health risks of environmental stressors in the UK Biobank cohort

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Over the past decades, there has been extensive research on the health risks associated with exposure to environmental stressors. Recent global assessments have found that air pollution and non-optimal outdoor temperature, two of the most important risk factors, are responsible for 7.6% and 9.4% of global deaths, respectively. However, while the evidence of their association with increased health risks is established, major gaps in knowledge still remain.This project illustrates an ambitious research programme for investigating health risks associated with environmental stressors using the UK Biobank (UKB), a cohort study that follows prospectively more than half a million participants. The research endeavour involves an international team of researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Case Western Reserve University in the USA, and Imperial College London, with multidisciplinary expertise and established experience in the research area.The research plan is structured in different steps. First, the research team will develop sophisticated spatio-temporal models based on machine learning to produce high-resolution maps of environmental stressors such as air pollution and temperature. The output will be used to reconstruct detailed exposure profiles for each UKB participant. The team will then develop innovative methodologies to analyse such a rich set of data and assess the health impacts of environmental stressors. These data resources and analytical methods will be used in a series of epidemiological studies that will investigate a range of different risks related to air pollution and temperature. These will include short-term effects on respiratory events such as asthma exacerbations, long-term associations with cardiovascular outcomes such as myocardial infarction, and individual susceptibility linked to pre-existing clinical conditions, medications, lifestyle habits, socio-economic characteristics, and neighbourhood features. Finally, the exposure data will be permanently linked to the UKB database, making available to the research community fully documented resources and easy-to-use tools to address further research questions on links between environmental stressors on human health.This project will contribute to advancing our knowledge of the health risks associated with exposure to environmental stressors, and improve our understanding of individual susceptibilities determined by socio-economic, lifestyle, clinical, and contextual factors. The provision of detailed exposure information to the UKB database will provide researchers with unique resources to improve our understanding of the complex relationships between environment, climate, and health.