Methods
The ESCAPE study will significantly increase knowledge on long-term health effects of air pollution by efficiently using health data already available from European cohort studies. To these studies, air pollution exposure assessment will be applied at the individual home address level of participants in each of these studies.
Exposure assessment
A mixture of measurements and modeling will be used to estimate exposure of study participants to ambient air pollution.
Specifically, we will perform spatially resolved measurements of PM10, PM2.5, the soot content of PM2.5 and NOx. PM measurements will be conducted at 20 monitoring sites per city or area; NOx measurements will be conducted at 40 monitoring sites per city or area. Measurements will be conducted for three periods of two weeks per site in the cold, warm and one intermediate temperature season.
Sites will be selected to represent the anticipated spatial variation of air pollution at home addresses of participants in the epidemiologic studies.
Annual average concentrations will be used to develop exposure models (for example land use regression models). This involves collection of predictor variables using GIS and development and validation of exposure models.
Health endpoints
The association between air pollution exposure and four 'effect' categories will be studied:
- Adverse pregnancy outcome studies, and birth cohort studies of children for outcomes such as asthma and allergy
- Cohort studies of respiratory biomarker and morbidity endpoints
- Cohort studies of cardiovascular biomarker and morbidity endpoints
- Cohort studies of non-accidental and cause specific mortality, and cancer incidence
 Measurement of fine particles with pump and sampling head |
 Measurement of nitrogen oxides with passive samplers |
