Urban environment and risk of asthma from childhood to adulthood

Identifying the urban environment exposures related to asthma is the key to mitigate the disease burden of asthma in urban areas.

We aim to adopt the exposome-wide approach to address the question: ‘Is there a single urban environment exposure or a combination of several exposures significantly associated with the risk of asthma from childhood to young adulthood?’ and the molecular mechanism behind these associations.We will use data from the prospective birth cohort BAMSE (Children, Allergy, Environment, Stockholm, Epidemiology).

Asthma outcomes from childhood to young adulthood will be assessed based on questionnaire at specific follow-ups.

Time-varying urban external exposome including ambient air pollution, noise, built environment, temperature, socioeconomic status from birth to the latest follow-up will be assessed. The internal exposome is represented by untargeted urine and serum metabolomics data.

We will apply exposome-wide approach to investigate the associations of both urban external and internal exposome with the risk of asthma and link the urban exposome to asthma in a causal-inference framework.The output of this project may offer better understanding to the complex relationships of urban environment exposures with asthma and help addressing environmental inequality using a multifaceted approach, eventually improving health outcomes for all individuals living in urban areas.