Reconstructing individual-level exposures in cohort analyses of environmental risks: an example with the UK Biobank

Recent developments in linkage procedures and exposure modelling offer great prospects for cohort analyses on the health risks of environmental factors. However, assigning individual-level exposures to large population-based cohorts poses methodological and practical problems. In this contribution, we illustrate a linkage framework to reconstruct environmental exposures for individual-level epidemiological analyses, discussing methodological and practical issues such as residential mobility and privacy concerns. The framework outlined here requires the availability of individual residential histories with related time periods, as well as high-resolution spatio-temporal maps of environmental exposures. The linkage process is carried out in three steps: (1) spatial alignment of the exposure maps and residential locations to extract address-specific exposure series; (2) reconstruction of individual-level exposure histories accounting for residential changes during the follow-up; (3) flexible definition of exposure summaries consistent with alternative research questions and epidemiological designs. The procedure is exemplified by the linkage and processing of daily averages of air pollution for the UK Biobank cohort using gridded spatio-temporal maps across Great Britain. This results in the extraction of exposure summaries suitable for epidemiological analyses of both short and long-term risk associations and, in general, for the investigation of temporal dependencies. The linkage framework presented here is generally applicable to multiple environmental stressors and can be extended beyond the reconstruction of residential exposures. IMPACT: This contribution describes a linkage framework to assign individual-level environmental exposures to population-based cohorts using high-resolution spatio-temporal exposure. The framework can be used to address current limitations of exposure assessment for the analysis of health risks associated with environmental stressors. The linkage of detailed exposure information at the individual level offers the opportunity to define flexible exposure summaries tailored to specific study designs and research questions. The application of the framework is exemplified by the linkage of fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) exposures to the UK Biobank cohort.