Study protocol: Respiratory health

The overall aim of the work package (EPHOR WP6) is to evaluate the impact of the working-life exposome on respiratory
health. The specific objectives are:

1. To apply new targeted and agnostic exposome methods to collect individual level data on the external and internal exposome in selected existing cohorts with extensive respiratory outcome data.
   
   
2. To examine how the long-term and short-term external working-life exposome affect lung function, lung function decline, and risk of asthma and COPD, and investigate if this is influenced by vulnerability factors such as gender and age.
   
   
3. To identify key biological pathways and markers for internal exposure and respiratory health effects associated with the external working-life exposome, using biomonitoring, targeted biomarker assays and agnostic genetics, epigenetics, transcriptomics and proteomics.

Key research questions:

1. How do long-term and short-term working-life exposome affect lung function, and risk of asthma and COPD?
   
   
2. Are these associations influenced by vulnerability factors such as gender and age?
   
   
3. What are the key biological markers for exposure and respiratory health?
   
   
4. What are the key biological pathways linking exposome exposure to respiratory health?