Understanding health outcomes through air pollution

There is now global recognition of the role air pollution plays in non-communicable diseases including stroke, heart disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; it has also been shown to impair cognitive function and childhood development. Researchers at The University of Manchester are developing models and tools that are being used to document and predict how environmental changes are impacting on human health.

Workplaces, homes, economic circumstances and lifestyle environments impact on health outcomes, starting with a child’s chances of a healthy future being dictated by the environment into which they are born.

Professor Hugh Coe is working with colleagues to develop modelling tools that will be used by medical and healthcare professionals to anticipate how the environment influences health outcomes to improve quality of life in the UK and globally.

Developing models for tracking pollution

A team working in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at The University of Manchester have developed an exposure model that looks at air quality within different regions of a city, and how people move through that city, to see what they are exposed to during their day.

The work, led by Dr Matthew Thomas, allows the team to break down the findings by age and the place they are living, for example, those living in urban areas compared to those in the suburbs, as the exposure for the different groups is likely to be very different.

The team developed the exposure model to predict how environmental factors affect health outcomes of different populations. The model has been used to show the impacts of air pollution at a range of different scales, especially at a global level due to the rapid urbanisation of many parts of the world.

The measurement and observational air pollution data, which the model delivers, are then linked with health statistics to help identify whether local air pollution can explain prevalence of particular diseases to the same region.

Marrying expertise

The correlations between air pollution and poor health are well known, but the mechanisms driving this relationship are less understood. Research teams in the School of Health Sciences in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health are working with environmental modellers in the Faculty of Science and Engineering to better understand how environmental drivers impact pollution-specific health outcomes across the globe.

Prof Coe says: “Manchester is unique in that it can bring together expertise in different fields with unique facilities to conduct initial experiments to identify pollutants within an environment, and then transfer this fundamental knowledge into a set of controlled health experiments that look at whether these pollutants link to diseases such as cancer, heart disease or lung disease.”

Climate change

Along with air pollution as a determinant of health outcomes, Professor Coe says that climate change, such as increases in humidity or temperature, could equally be mapped to health outcomes.

"Globally, we are seeing massive urbanisation which comes with a whole raft of health pressures that weren’t there previously," he explains.

"We need to develop our knowledge of the physical and chemical environment, in a way that health researchers can comprehend; to allow them to understand the biological and physiological response to those changes. Only then can we address the question: ‘we want to make the environment healthier, so what do we really need to do beyond just reducing pollution?’

"There are plenty of sources of pollution and understanding which of these are most important and how they drive disease is essential for us to move beyond our current simple and broad brush approach to addressing air pollution problems. We have not come close to scratching the interface between the environment and health and what that really means."

Global approach

Joint working - combining expertise, capability and local knowledge - is vital to underpinning the development of regional solutions to the challenging air pollution problem.

The University of Manchester is currently working alongside Chinese scientists in Beijing, collaborating with Indian researchers in Delhi and participating in a variety of studies across South East Asia and Africa to address urban air quality across the globe.