Lifecourse of place

Professor Jamie Pearce is leading a project with Professor Niamh Shortt and Gergő Baranyi examining whether and how exposure to green space, air pollution and area-level deprivation in childhood, adulthood and old age affects healthy ageing.  

With the proportion of older adults increasing across the world, population-wide healthy ageing is an increasingly important research priority with significant implications for policymakers working in this area.  Emerging evidence shows that the places where people live and grow older can support healthy ageing, and the impact of places varies across the life course. However, it is less well established how social and physical environmental exposures “get under the skin” to affect cellular ageing and become embodied in human health.  

The study makes use of unique longitudinal data from the Lothian Birth Cohort, following adults born in 1936 in the area around Edinburgh, Scotland.  Measures of environmental exposure in the participants’ residential area throughout their life were collected from historical records, while local measures of air pollution across the 20th century were calculated using atmospheric chemistry transport models.  Researchers will use markers of healthy ageing that were captured in late adulthood with cognitive assessments (e.g. processing speed, verbal memory), brain imaging (e.g. total brain volume) and indicators of biological ageing (e.g. telomere length).  

This interdisciplinary project is a collaboration with Professor Catharine Ward Thomson from OPENspace research centre and Dr Simon Cox, Director of the Lothian Birth Cohort Studies, and includes partners from policy and advocacy.  It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Secondary Data Analysis Initiative.  

More information on this project award can be found on *ERE