Respiratory Environmental Health

These research themes underpin the team's overall goal to understand the factors that contribute to respiratory disease, and thus improve the respiratory health of children and their families.

The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) concept describes how maternal and environmental factors interact during development to have long-term consequences on later health and disease. The main focus of DOHaD has been on how early-life nutritional insults manifest as chronic disease in adult life, however there is increasing evidence that in utero and early-life exposure to environmental insults, such as air pollution, tobacco smoke, pathogens and allergens is involved in the early programming of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

This evidence is based on epidemiological studies, but is confounded by the complex inter-related exposures that children experience during development. Because of this complexity, a significant knowledge gap exists around the mechanisms associated between environmental exposures and the development of respiratory disease and dysfunction. By understanding key lung development processes we aim to design interventions that will ultimately prevent the onset of respiratory disease and improve lung health in the community.

Facilitated through collaborations with researchers examining clinical outcomes, the team's approach to research is multi-disciplinary, with epidemiological and clinical studies informing the design of mechanistic pre-clinical studies. These are in turn used to identify issues that require further investigation in terms of clinical outcomes and public health.