Air pollution and asthma in school age - three studies for improved understanding of interactions and complex relations

Asthma is the most common chronic condition among children.

It not only leads to a lower quality of life in childhood, but also increase the risk of poor health later in life and puts stress on health care system.

Improved prevention is needed.Several risk factors for childhood asthma are often highlighted, but options for prevention are restricted because of important gaps in our understanding of the environmental risk factors, their associations with socioeconomic conditions and lifestyle and their causal pathways.

The association between early air pollution exposure and children´s respiratory health, and societal consequences of this association, is thus one of the most important environmental problems to address.

The needed studies must have a large sample size and high-quality data on asthma occurence, pollutants and other risk factors to adjust for potential confounding and examine effect modification and mediating effects with state of the art methods.The planned project has three aims and corresponding sub studies: To study if the association between early life air pollution exposure and childhood asthma is modified by socioeconomic conditions.To study the association between air pollution exposure in different time windows and later life school grades, and if asthma is mediating the effect.To study if there is a cross-generational association between air pollution and childhood respiratory disease.Two large study populations will be based on register data.

In the 1st and 3rd study all children born in Sweden 2005-2013 with at least one Swedish-born parent in the register will be included. The second study will include all births in Sweden 1995-2005.

From the registers we will have geocodes for all home addresses (for children from birth, parents during pregnancy, and grandparents when expecting the parents) and link to modelled air pollution data, and socioeconomic data at individual and area level, plus diagnoses, lifestyle and other important variables.