Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Lungs are for life, and we don't think about them much. Yet, even small babies can have serious lung diseases, like asthma which is a life-long problem. In fact, asthma is the most common long-term illness that starts in very early life. In asthma, the breathing passages becomes red, swollen and "twitchy" so they sometimes go into spasm, making it very hard to breathe. Asthma has no cure. Even if they feel fine, people with asthma still have the disease and it can flare up at any time. In Canada, asthma is the most common and burdensome chronic non-communicable disease affecting young Canadians. This is a segment of the population deserving special attention given their age, vulnerability and the burden at the societal and economic level: 1-in-3 Canadians will be diagnosed with asthma in their lifetime. It isn't clear why only some people get asthma, but we think it is probably due to a combination of environmental and inherited (genetic) factors. The goal of the proposed research is to understand environmental and genetic factors that cause asthma in children. We will use samples and data from a large Canadian study, where the mothers and babies were assessed in pregnancy, at birth, and up to age 5 years. We will determine effects of carefully-chosen environmental factors predicted to be related to asthma: traffic pollution, neighboring green spaces, and types of bacteria living in our intestines. Early life is a critical period to shape the later life health, especially through epigenetics mechanism: changes in the function of our genes in relation to environmental influences provide a basis to explain how and why asthma and allergies exist and progress. We hope to gain new understanding to create better tools to predict who will get asthma and find ways to prevent asthma from developing in the first place.