• Rapid urbanization has given India some of the world’s worst air pollution, a factor implicated in the deaths of more than 620,000 Indians each year.
• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Delhi’s air is the most polluted in the world.
• Recent findings by the WHO, which examined pollution levels in nearly 1,600 cities in 91 countries for the years 2008 to 2013, show that the annual mean fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration in Delhi was 153 μg/m3, far exceeding the WHO-recommended annual mean of <10 μg/m3.
• Urban living can affect a person’s risk of CM disease in many different ways. In addition to increasing exposure to air pollution, a known risk factor, it often affects the major potentially modifiable drivers of CM risk factors, including tobacco use, occupation, alcohol use, obesity, physical inactivity, and unhealthy diet.
• An emerging body of evidence indicates a link between many of these factors—specifically obesity, physical inactivity, unhealthy diets, and air pollution—and the built environment. The WHO recently cited exposure to outdoor air pollution (6th) and physical inactivity (11th) among the top 15 risk factors for the global burden of disease in South Asian countries.

• Developing a model to estimate ambient exposure to Ambient Air Pollution (AAP) and health outcomes in Chennai and Delhi, India.
• Estimating association between exposure to AAP, temperature, CM risk factors and diseases, and characterizing susceptibility.
• Characterizing Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) methylation patterns associated with Air Pollution (AP) & investigate whether they predict AAP-mediated CM health effects.
• Estimating association between AAP & vitamin D levels.
• Expanding the exposure model Pan-India to utilize health data collected across additional cohorts.
• Characterizing personal exposure patters in urban settings, and how they are differentiated by location, socio-economic status (SES), occupation, mode of travel, etc.

Publications

Case Studies

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