“The Augsburg-led project succeeded in gaining funding from the Health Effects Institute, a US-based nonprofit, to the amount of $1.1 million USD in a highly competitive process involving 44 international competitors,” said Professor Martina Kadmon, the dean of medicine at the University of Augsburg. The planned research is of direct importance to the health of the population in Augsburg and the region. “We want to investigate the effects that changes in mobility behavior have on the cardiovascular system and people’s metabolism. We are focusing on ultra-fine particles, soot, and metal compounds in particulate matter, which have been little studied as environmental factors to date,” explains Professor Christoph Knote, who will lead the project.

Project aims to develop recommendations for action from realistic future scenarios

An important basis for the study is the population-based cohort study KORA (Cooperative Health Research in the Augsburg Region) conducted by Helmholtz Munich in collaboration with Augsburg University Hospital, which has been in operation since 1984. It aims to gain a better understanding of the relationship between behavior, genes and environmental factors and their effects on health, with a focus on widespread chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, health in later life, as well as the influence of the environment. “We will combine clinical data on strokes, heart attacks, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes from this long-term study with innovative measurements and modeling of air pollutants and their distribution in Augsburg. We are using mobile measuring devices, which study participants carry with them, to understand their exposure to particulate matter in certain places and at certain times,” says Knote, explaining the project’s methodological approach. Ultimately, the aim is to realistically simulate the spatial behavior of the entire population in the study area and then develop future scenarios that also consider climate change, which can lead to higher temperatures as well as increased air pollution. From this, the researchers then want to derive specific recommendations for action. This will result from a scaling up of the results to cover the greater Munich area to then derive overall values for Germany. Project developments and results will be documented as open source projects that can be transferred to other regions of the world so that they can be used in little-studied low- and middle-income countries.

About the project

The project “TRANSCAPE: Transportation and Cardiometabolic Health and Air Pollution Evaluation” funded by the Health Effects Institute to the tune of $1.1 million USD will start in May. The project is led by the Chair of Model-based Environmental Exposure Science at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Augsburg (Prof. Christoph Knote). Project partners are the Institute of Epidemiology at Helmholtz Munich (Dr. Alexandra Schneider) and the Professorship of Traffic Behavior at the Technical University of Munich (Prof. Rolf Moeckel). The Institute for Medical Information Processing, Biometry and Epidemiology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich is contributing its biostatistical expertise. The Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen is also involved.