Grant: Project Grant

Many Canadians suffer from a chronic lung condition called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, which causes shortness of breath, cough, and sputum production. While we have long blamed cigarette smoking as the cause of COPD, we now know that smoking cannot explain all of the risk for COPD. There is now a greater appreciation that social, economic, and environmental disadvantages place Canadians at higher risk for developing COPD. How this happens on a biological level remains unknown, though. We propose that these disadvantages alter marks on the genome in a process known as methylation. This process can rapidly age an individual's lung leading to COPD. We will utilize these methylation changes to identify which disadvantages have the greatest impact on lung aging and whether these changes can be used to predict those Canadians at greatest risk for poor lung outcomes.