25.04.14
Health atlas reveals UK’s ‘patterns of illness’
Researchers at Imperial College London have launched a detailed open-access atlas allowing the public to find the risk of developing 14 diseases – including lung cancer, heart disease and leukaemia – depending on where they live.
The map, produced by the UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment & Health based at Imperial College London, allows users to input a postcode and zoom into a neighbourhood (around 6,000 people) to browse between the health and environment maps for that local area.
This is the first time in the UK that researchers have produced these maps at such high spatial resolution. And they provide an indication of the health risk for the area relative to the average for England and Wales.
However, the researchers stated that the maps “do not represent the risk for an individual” living in that area.
It was also stated that simply comparing the health and environment maps will not enable people to conclude there is a causal link between a specific environmental agent and a health condition, but it can highlight areas for future research.
Lead author Dr Anna Hansell from SAHSU in Imperial College London’s School of Public Health, said: “The atlas is a fantastic tool for researchers, policy makers and the public.
“It connects people to health and environment at a neighbourhood level and provides resources to learn about these issues. It also allows us to identify the important questions that need answering about patterns of health and environment risk for future avenues of research.”
The atlas uses data from the Office of National Statistics and cancer registries for 1985 to 2009. For health data, the maps illustrate relative risk - the rates or number of cases for an area compared to the average for England and Wales - as a long-term average.
Looking across all health conditions there are 33 wards that show more consistent patterns of lower relative health risks compared to only eight at the higher end of health risk. Those areas that appear to have the lowest relative risk are in central London, North Norfolk, parts of Suffolk, and Brighton & Hove. The areas with the higher relative risk tend to be in the North West, parts of Yorkshire and South Wales.
According to the researchers, some conditions show a lot of geographical variation that can’t be explained by deprivation or ageing with examples including lung cancer, skin cancer, liver cancer and chronic pulmonary disease.
Alongside the health risk maps, the online atlas provides a series of maps of four environmental agents: air pollution, agricultural pesticides, disinfection by-products in drinking water and sunshine duration. As neighbourhood-level environmental data were not available for all years, most agents are represented by data from 2000 or 2001.
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