Children’s Health in London and Luton: Health Records Study (CHILL HR)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigating the impact of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone on children’s health: evidence from NHS health records
IRAS ID
288718
Contact name
Chris Griffiths
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Queen Mary University of London, Joint Research Management Office
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 9 months, 1 days
Research summary
Air pollution damages children's health and development. In 2019, we established the CHILL study, a NIHR-funded prospective parallel cohort study of over 3,000 children from 85 primary schools (41 in London, 44 in Luton).
The CHILL (Children's Health in London and Luton) Study addresses whether air quality improvements delivered through the introduction of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone in Central London are sufficient to improve lung growth trajectories and respiratory health in children growing up in highly trafficked urban environments. CHILL is a natural experiment; it's parallel prospective controlled cohort design provides the most robust way of evaluating the impact of an environmental public health intervention.
To add value to the CHILL study, we now propose to seek evidence of impacts on children's health from CHILL participants' NHS health records, and therefore request NHS research ethics approval for an add-on study: the 'CHILL Health Record' (CHILL HR) study.
With consent from children and parents taking part in CHILL, we will approach participants' GP practices and relevant NHS data services (the London DISCOVERY programmes and Luton equivalent), to extract coded data on health outcomes, including new diagnoses of respiratory, allergy, developmental and mental health conditions, respiratory infections, COVID-19, and health care use.
We will link these health record data to CHILL study data including: 1) physiological data on lung growth and cognitive development, which we are collecting through annual school health assessment visits, 2) parental and child annual questionnaire data, and 3) detailed modeled air quality exposures for each child, to provide the most robust and detailed analysis yet of the impacts of a major city wide low emission zone on children's health and development.
Results will have implications for the design and implementation of air quality interventions in the UK and globally. We will disseminate our results internationally to influence policy and practice.
REC name
West of Scotland REC 4
REC reference
22/WS/0065
Date of REC Opinion
21 Jun 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion