Project
We understand that certain pollutants can negatively affect brain health, but exactly how and when exposures happen are still unclear, along with their contribution to dementia.
ExpoSignalz aims to clarify how a range of environmental pollutants impact brain health throughout a person’s life and their association with dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s disease.
The consortium will conduct research over five years to identify new chemical pollutants as risk factors for dementia and their associated biomarkers. The project will utilise both experimental and epidemiological approaches to achieve its goals.
Read more about our research:
Impacts
The overarching impact of ExpoSignalz will be to reduce or delay the incidence of Alzheimer's disease, thereby alleviating the economic and social challenges linked to the condition. ExpoSignalz will deliver the following:
- Evidence-based guidelines on regulating emerging pollutants and the need to update limits on regulatory doses for the general population and at-risk groups. We will provide recommendations for promoting behaviour change at both individual and systemic levels.
- A user-friendly database with screened pollutants and the doses at which detrimental neurotoxic effects are expected.
- Understanding the biological effects of exposure to anilinopyrimidines and the results from studies using three to six mixtures of pollutants demonstrated in vitro and in vivo.
- Neurotoxicity tests to predict neurodegeneration trajectories and identify early markers of pollutant exposure.
- Potential biomarkers for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
- An annotated library of chemical fingerprints for thousands of suspect pollutants, along with improvements to the software (Scannotation).
- An assessment of the associated health impacts and economic costs, including a study on citizens’ willingness to pay for improved safety measures.