Grant: Environments, Genes and Chronic Disease - Environment-Microbiome-Gene

Lungs are for life, and we don't think about them much. Yet even small babies and children can have serious lung diseases, like asthma. In fact, asthma is the most common long-term illness that starts in very early life, and if it starts in childhood, it is a life-long problem. In asthma, the breathing passages (airways) become 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, about 1 in 3 people has asthma. It isn't clear why only some people get asthma, but we think it is probably due to a combination of environmental and genetic (inherited) factors. Our goal 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 4 carefully-chosen environmental factors predicted to be related to asthma in children: traffic pollution and the amount of green space in neighborhoods; types of bacteria living in our intestines; stress families experience during pregnancy and in the early life of a baby; and breastfeeding. 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.