Theme: Mechanisms

Project Description

Prevention-oriented research remains crucial to enable and nourish both the growing and ageing brain. A recent Lancet-commissioned review has suggested air pollution as a newly-identified modifiable risk factors for dementia. Research led by the Leicester team has identified, for the first time in the UK, traffic noise as a novel contributor to both cognitive impairment and dementia incidence in middle-to-older age groups. Among children, we previously found that early-life air pollution exposure was linked to poorer cognitive health at school age. In addition to air pollution and other environmental hazards, extreme weather events (e.g., wildfires, heatwave, flooding) due to climate change are also posing significant risks on our mental and brain health.

In general, the evidence base of associations between environmental or climatic exposures and poorer mental and brain health in children and older people remains weak in the UK.  Such evidence is crucially important to inform policy as the UK public, particularly some of the most vulnerable groups (children and elderly), are facing increasing health risks from the changing climate.

This PhD project will generate significant shift in our understandings of environmental/climate exposures on mental and brain health, strengthen the evidence base and inform effective policy-making.  We will use two well-characterised national cohorts (ELSA and OxWell study) to answer three key research questions: (1) we will consider, in the framework of “exposome”, a broader picture of environmental stressors beyond air pollution in association with mental and brain health; (2) we will investigate the omics signatures underlying these complex associations; (3) we will explore how these physical exposures are interacting with deprivation as well as online social environment to drive these adverse associations.