CHESS UK - Chronic Health Effects of Smoke and SO2 in the UK
Staff involved
Principal Investigator: Dr Anna Hansell
Co-investigator: Professor Paul Elliott
Professor David Briggs
Dr Jon Gulliver
Ms Chloe Morris
Official collaborators
AEA Technology (AEAT) plc, Didcot, Oxfordshire
Prof David Strachan, Department of Public Health Sciences, St George's Hospital Medical School, London.
Dr Ravi Maheswaran, Section of Public Health, ScHARR, The University of Sheffield
Brief description of study
This is a four year project starting November 2005 with the aim of establishing whether long term air pollution exposures in adult life are associated with cardiovascular and respiratory disease in the UK. The UK has been monitoring black smoke and sulphur dioxide concentrations from 1955, with over 3100 monitoring stations in existence at various points. This provides an opportunity to model historic exposures to these pollutants and examine cumulative effects of air pollution exposure in existing national cohort studies. The study is supported by Wellcome Trust grant number 075883.
Specific objectives
- (i) To create an inventory of data giving information relevant to national air pollution exposures to black smoke and SO2 from 1955
- (ii) To derive a set of modelled concentration surfaces for black smoke and SO2 in 1955-2001 using a range of GIS techniques as a basis for exposure assessment in epidemiological investigations of chronic health effects.
- (iii) To conduct an individual-level analysis of the Longitudinal Study (LS) to investigate the long-term associations between air pollution and cardiovascular and COPD mortality, using air pollution exposures derived in objective (i)
- (iv) To investigate the association between cumulative air pollution exposures derived in (i) and health outcomes in other national UK cohorts and use these to develop further study proposals including gene-air pollution interactions.
Interpolated Black Smoke concentrations for 1962
