Ole Hertel
Aarhus University, Denmark
Title: Assessment of Human Environmental Exposures -First Results from the Danish Big Data Centre BERTHA
Biography
Biography: Ole Hertel
Abstract
Environmental exposures have serious health impacts on the population worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared Air Pollution to be the most hazardous environmental exposure, with ambient air pollution being responsible for 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2016. Other environmental exposures, such as noise and airborne allergens, are also hazardous to health and in some cases even with synergistic effects. In assessments of health effects, environmental exposure at the address is often taken as a proxy for personal exposure. The detailed and personalized Danish population and health registers provide unique possibilities for assessing health effects of environmental exposures. The Novo Nordic foundation funded BERTHA centre (Big data center for EnviRonmenT and HeAlth (www.bertha.au.dk) will take environmental exposure assessment to a new level, accounting for time-activity patterns in the exposure assessments, taking a whole life-course approach, from conception until diagnosis. In this work, personal exposure monitors, mathematical exposure models, agent based modelling, and App driven registration of activity and wellbeing will, in combination with health related registry data, be used for assessment of the association between environmental exposures and adverse health outcomes. BERTHA links up to the Center for Integrated Register Based Research Aarhus University (CIRRAU) in which access to all Danish registries on health and population data is available for the entire Danish population at the individual level. In addition to air pollution, environmental exposures like noise, airborne allergens, quality of drinking water and access to green and blue space will be included in the analyses. Low-cost sensor based personal monitoring will be a strong element in the work, and this work has already been initiated. Three different cohorts will be included in the centre’s research: 110,000 people in the Danish Blood Donor cohort, the Run-safe cohort consisting of Danes using Garmin Devices, and a cohort of 8,000 patients with cardiac arrhythmia that have implanted Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD). The presentation will outline the planned and ongoing activities of the BERTHA centre and present some of the first results from application of the low-cost sensor based devices, exposure modelling, environmental geography and social-science as well as epidemiological analyses.